The recently-launched, refereed INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL FOR EDUCATIONAL INTEGRITY [ISSN 1833-2595] intends to provide a
forum to address educational integrity topics: "plagiarism, cheating,
academic integrity, honour codes, teaching and learning, university
governance, and student motivation." The journal, to be published two times
a year, is sponsored by the University of South Australia. For more
information and to read the current issue, go to
http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/journals/index.php/IJEI .

Candidates attempting to cheat in an exam by writing
on a part of their body must be reported to the chief invigilator immediately.
Please speak to an exam attendant who will contact the student administration
office. Keep the students under close observation to ensure that they do not
attempt to erase the evidence. The chief invigilator will arrange for a member
of staff with a camera to come to the exam room to photograph the evidence to
present to the examinations offences panel.
Signs on the walls of Student Administration Office at Queen Mary College in
London, as reported by Abbott Katz, "Inside Higher Ed, May 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/31/katz

A World Class Athlete With World Class Ethics That Will Impact Upon Future
GenerationsHe speaks his mind --- and apologizes later.
He loves to party --- and doesn't care about winning. Yet Bode Miller
is poised to strike Olympic gold. On the slopes with skiing's bad
boy,.
Bill Saporito. As written on the cover of Time Magazine, January 23,
2006 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1149374,00.html

Jensen Comment
Bode Miller is the best of the best in a sport where winners are determined
by hundredths of a second on a stop watch. His picture is on the cover
of the January 23, 2006 edition of Time Magazine. Although he's
relatively unknown in his home country (U.S.A.), he's been an established
hero in Europe where crowds chanted "Bode, Bode, . . . ." while he was on
his way to winning the 2005 World Cup. He's poised to become the Gold
Medal hero in the 2006 and obtained recent U.S. notoriety due to a recent
interview on Sixty Minutes (CBS television) in which he admitted that having
fun is more important than winning and that he sometimes partied too much
when skiing including a few instances when he was a bit tipsy or hung over
when crashing down the slope at over 80 miles per hour.

Chagrined media analysts questioned whether the partying and outspoken
Bode Miller was really a role model for our young people. I contend
that he is largely do to some things buried in the article in Time
Magazine. After discussing his partying and independent nature, the
article goes on to explain how Bode more than any other skier in history
made a science out of the sport. Most of his life has been spent
studying and experimenting with every item of clothing and equipment, every
position for every circumstance on the slopes, and the torques and forces of
every move under every possible slope condition. That sort of makes him my
hero, but what really makes him my hero is the following quotation that
speaks for itself:

Last year, after tinkering with his boots, he
discovered that inserting a composite --- as opposed to aluminum or
plastic --- lift under the sole gave him a better feel on the snow and
better performance. Then he did something really crazy, he shared
the information with everyone, including competitors. His
equipment team flipped, but in the Miller school of philosophy this
makes complete sense. Otherwise, he says, "I'm maintaining an
unfair advantage over my competitors knowingly, for the purpose of
beating them alone. Not for the purpose of enjoying it more or
skiing better.To me that's
ethically unsound."

One has to be reminded of the famous poem painted on the wall of my old
Algona High School gymnasium:

Setting a bad example for its students: Plagiarized from Alabama
A&M UniversityA federal judge on Friday blocked the Southern
Association of Colleges and Schools from revoking the accreditation of Edward
Waters College while the institution pursues a due process lawsuit against the
association. In December, the regional accrediting group said that it had
revoked the Florida college's accreditation, citing documents Edward Waters
officials had submitted to the association that appeared to have been
plagiarized from Alabama A&M University, another historically black
institution.
Doug Lederman, "Staying Alive," Inside Higher Ed, March 14, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/insider/staying_alive

With a new academic year starting, I wanted to remind
everyone of the following comprehensive webliography on plagiarism. Each entry
is annotated, and each entry represents a document that is available on the
Web:

This is "academic-speak" for we do not want to hold
the schools accountable for ethics education. AACSB's failure to set
specific goals for business ethics education speaks volumes about the
political pressure from accredited schools that were brought to bear on any
new standards that require specific education. Academic administrators do
not want to be tied down to a specific course of action or program; they
want a more "flexible" approach. The result is a meaningless standard that
fails to address the critical problems that face us today in graduating
business students who become tomorrow's future abusers of the capitalist
system because of narcissitic behavior.

So, what should be done about the failure of
business ethics education over the years to stem the rising tide of
corporate fraud and wrongdoing? I believe the emphasis of business ethics
education has to change from teaching philosophical reasoning methods that
rarely work in practice to a more values-based approach that emphasizes
ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is a must in any discipline --
accounting, finance, information systems, management and marketing.
Therefore, all college instructors should buy into the need to slant their
teaching methods to incorporate leadership -- ethical leadership.

Jensen Comment
Those of us that have had to deal with cheating students over the years,
including those who cheated in ethics classes, discover that ethics behavior or
lack thereof is very, very complicated. Unethical behavior and cheating is very
situational and opportunistic. Sometimes lapses arise when there are heavy
demands on time such as those demands of varsity athletics, troubled marriages,
child illness, etc. Sometimes lapses arise from a follow-the-herd situation such
as that recently observed among 125 students in a recent Harvard political
science course.

In my opinion, most lapses in ethics do not arise from ignorance about the
ethics guidelines. Therefore, teaching about it is not likely to have much
incremental benefit in preventing ethics lapses at the individual level. There
may be some benefit in terms of awareness and better writing of ethics
guidelines. And studying what happens when violations of ethics have severe
consequences may instill some fear. For example, expelling half the 125 students
who were caught cheating in one political science class probably made the
remaining students at Harvard University sit up and take notice that the
Harvard's Student Honor Code is not toothless.

Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business is the
latest MBA program to report using plagiarism detection software to check
applicant essays during the admissions process. It’s the highest-ranked
program by Bloomberg Businessweek to come forward about using the service.

Fuqua rejected one applicant for “blatant
plagiarism” but was cautious about turning away others because the 2012-13
school year was a pilot period for using IParadigms’ Turnitin detection
system, the school said. No details on the rejected applicant were
available.

“We chose to review a large number of applications
to understand what threshold would be appropriate to use in the future to
investigate for plagiarism,” Liz Riley Hargrove, Fuqua’s associate dean for
admissions, said in an e-mail. ”We are still in the process of fine-tuning
the system and understanding what the scores mean and how we will leverage
it next year and what our investigative process will be.”

Riley Hargrove says the school had received
information that led the admissions team to believe some applicants did not
write their essays. There’s no way “to catch every single thing that’s been
manufactured, but we thought this was one step we could take to help,” she
says.

UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has rejected
about 115 applicants on the grounds of plagiarized admissions essays since
it began using Turnitin heading into the 2011-12 school year. Penn State’s
Smeal College of Business has denied about 87 since 2009 for the same
offense.

Other Turnitin users include the business schools
at Wake Forest University and Northeastern University. Most schools don’t
disclose that they are using the service, however, and the company keeps its
client roster private.

UCLA has consistently found that about 2 percent of
its MBA applicants plagiarize their essays and has traced lifted passages
back to the websites of nonprofit organizations as well as websites that
advertise free essays or help with editing essays. The school expects that
pattern to continue into its third application round this year, which means
it may find additional cases of plagiarism before fall.

“Potential” cases of plagiarism at Northeastern’s
business school were expected to double to about 100 cases by April 15,
Evelyn Tate, the school’s director of graduate recruitment and admissions,
told Bloomberg Businessweek in February.

For the 2012-13 school year, Penn State’s Smeal
reports that 40 applicants were flagged for plagiarizing essays,
representing about 8 percent of its applicant pool.

“Over the years it just feels like there is a lot
of pressure among applicants to manage perfect essays,” says Duke’s Riley
Hargrove. “This felt like the right thing to do.”

That the Internet is a game changer is well-known
phenomenon. In fact, the word most usually associated with this phenomenon
is "disruptive," and it is a good one because more times than not it is
truly a neutral, descriptive term. Depending on what side of the fence you
are on at the time of the disruption, you might think it either a good or
bad thing. Think content industry: bad. Think people without money who want
access to content: good. Of course, life, law and technology are infinitely
more complicated than those Manichaeism terms, but you get the idea. Let's
see how it applies to academic integrity.

But first let's be sure we have a foundational understanding of the concept.
Academic Integrity is larger than plagiarism, but taking other people's
work without attribution and with a notion that it is your own is the lion's
share. How is it to be distinguished from copyright? Copyright is law;
academic integrity is policy. You won't go to jail or pay a fine if you
violate it, but within the community of scholars -- academic or public --
depending on a number of factors, you may lose your job or some degree of
credibility. If you are a student, also depending on a number of factors,
you may have to rewrite a paper, get a failing grade in the assignment, fail
the course, or even be suspended or expelled from the institution.
Copyright is not cured by attribution; in most cases, plagiarism is. Why
is it important? Because it goes straight to the heart of academia: a
community of scholars, stretched throughout all of human history, whose
central dynamic is developing original work while standing on the shoulders
of those who have come before us, irrespective of whether it was 10,000
years or 10 minutes ago. It is to newcomers, i.e. students, a special
community with special rules, hence the difference between law and policy.
It is an invitation to be part of the life of the mind, so long as you play
by the rules.

Now, to be sure, the exact nature and shape of the rules can change given
any number of factors, some obviously larger than others. Technology is a
big one. Cutting and pasting having become so easy suddenly makes wholesale
"copying" a facile process; how that function leads a tired, insecure or
intentionally violative student down the road of perdition is a factor that
educators must take into account no matter whether they like or don't like
the fact of the technology that allows a student to do it. Here is why:
because the best, well intentioned students are anxious that they make a
mistake. That we do not want to cause our students undue anxiety. It is
not warranted, if we pay attention to the world in which they live and help
them clarify the rules to the practices, and nor is it wise for us to allow
undue measure of anxiety to get in the way genuine learning. An overly
cautious student may ultimately learn as little as the too liberal student
when it comes to plagiarism. If learning is the name of the game, it
behooves educators to get it right.

So much has been written about remix that I need not go into detail here
about it (Lessig's books is good start, although more focused on law than
academic integrity). Suffice it to say that remix now constitutes a very
significant approach, trope and motif of contemporary culture that if we do
not think hard about how we want academia to be of but not in this world, we
will not serve either ourselves or our students. Technology has made it
possible, yes, but technology in this instance once again demonstrates its
transfigurative powers. That is, we see the academic dynamic -- something
borrowed, something new -- more clearly than we might have seen it without
technology. We should use that insight to bridge generations of learners
and the tools and methods by which they learn.

For anyone who does not believe there is anything new under the sun worth
talking about, allow me to share some personal experience. In creating a
site on digital literacy, I spent some time talking to students about
academic integrity. <http://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu/>
I also brought Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard
College and a good and wise man, to talk with the Cornell community about
any number of related issues. I learned probably more than anyone. Did you
know that you can find whole instructors' manuals on the campus intranet?
That means if at two in the morning you still have not gotten to that
chemical engineering assignment (or name your subject), you can find the
answer with a few keystrokes. Know how we know? Because students who
plagiarize the manual turn in the same mistakes as the manual. Even better,
when anywhere from one to two thirds of class of 200+ students turn in the
same assignment with the same mistake, Houston, we have a problem! I
exaggerate not. But I have not even gotten to the most upsetting part of
this story. Do you know why you don't hear about as often as it occurs?
Because untenured professors who tend to be the ones who teach these large
classes are sufficiently concerned about their teaching evaluations as to
minimize the issue. Having talked to young professors in this situation, I
can report that they are very torn about it, but make their choices in the
calculous of their lives and careers. Have they worked sufficiently with
chairmen, deans and provosts on this matter? The answer to that question
belongs to every institution to address, and not once but continuously. Do
young professors have the understanding of academic leadership at their
institutions? That question should be a part of the conversation.

There is an extraordinary tension in our culture
between individual creativity and the creative community, between
originality and a shared body of knowledge, between the acts of reading
culture and writing culture. And our students are caught in the middle.

In reality, culture exists in that in-between space
where things are shared. When we read, we inscribe what we read with our own
meaning. When we write, we draw inspiration from all of the things we have
read; they follow our words like shadows thrown behind us. When we come up
with a new idea, we’ve built it on ideas that others have already had and
hope our ideas become a platform for new construction. We are never entirely
alone, and our ideas are never entirely original.

These things become murky when students who are
told to work independently break the rules and collaborate on homework or an
exam.
Harvard studentsare currently in the news for
having done this; a few years ago
students at Ryerson Universityin Canada formed a
Facebook group to work on homework problems (and were, wittingly or not,
following advice provided on the university’s own website advising students
how to study effectively). One can argue that these students violated a
clearly-stated rule and so are unequivocally guilty of cheating. But it also
seems clear that we are sending mixed messages: forming study groups is good
for learning. Except when you’re told not to, in which case it’s so
unethical it can get you expelled.

Some argue that students’ willingness to cheat is a
symptom of our skewed values as a society – that getting a grade and being
awarded a degree is more important than learning, that an investment in
college has become less to do with knowledge or personal development and
everything to do with material success. This is nothing new; we’ve grumbled
about students being too focused on grades for as long as I can remember.
Students quoted in the Times seemed to feel they were the
ones who had been cheated, that they had been tricked into thinking they
could pass the course without much work and were unfairly given tests that
were harder than expected, that the rules of engagement were violated. Other
commentaries suggest (as
did the Harvard dean of undergraduate
education) that technology feeds cheating because it makes sharing too easy.
(Libraries work hard to make sharing easy, and still largely fail; faulting
our systems for being “too easy” seems a bit perverse.) On the other hand,
it also makes it more detectable. Had the students at Ryerson met face to
face in the library to work on homework problems rather than on Facebook,
they likely would never have faced punishment.

I suspect a large part of the problem is that we
send such mixed messages to students. You may hate group work, but it will
prepare you for the reality of the workplace - but when we tell you to work
alone, don’t discuss the test or homework problems with anybody else or face
severe punishment. When you write a paper, your work must be original - but
back up every point by quoting someone else who thought of it first. Develop
your own voice as a writer – but try to sound as much like us as possible.

The fire and brimstone tone of plagiarism warnings
are another kind of mixed message. Most students understand that it’s
ethically wrong to purchase a paper and hand it in as one’s own. Most
students understand that copying chunks of text without acknowledging the
source is plagiarism. But most students will encounter gray areas. What if
they can’t recall where they first encountered an idea? What if they only
found a source because another source pointed them toward it? Given they
weren’t born knowing what they are writing about, what is there that they
shouldn’t cite? If they check Wikipedia to refresh their memory of
a film, should they cite it, or does the “common knowledge” loophole absolve
them of that duty? Apparently not.

Conscientious students spend an inordinate amount
of time trying to figure out how to cite new forms of publication that
continually escape the rulebooks, and the rules are updated in ways that are
puzzling and complex. The APA now encourages writers to say they articles
were retrieved from publishers’ websites when, in fact, they were retrieved
from a library website. (Of course, the APA makes a great deal of money as a
publisher, and they probably feel publishers are the rock-solid source of
knowledge, now that libraries are mostly renting information on a temporary
basis.) Deciding how to cite an article requires
a daunting flowchart– which nevertheless fails to
answer the problem of how to locate the link to the publisher’s website when
you actually got the article from a library database. Saying an article was
“retrieved from” a site where it wasn’t seems wrong. Yet following citation
rules is an important part of academic integrity. My head hurts.

Clare Trayner, 23, was a geography student at
Royal Holloway who was accused of cheating after anti-plagiarism software
flagged up her essay

"Everyone was emailed to collect their essay, but
mine was held back. I was then told to attend a formal meeting as I had been
caught committing plagiarism. I knew I hadn't cheated but I wasn't clear on
what the problem was.

"I was told one paragraph had been flagged up as
resembling the content on an internet site. Eventually I was found guilty of
plagiarism but as it was my first time I would be only marked down by 10 per
cent on that module. My mark for the module went from a high 2:1 to a 2:2."

BlackBerrys and iPhones need just a couple of taps
of the keypad to offer the right answers. It doesn't matter whether the
subject is math, social studies, science, English, or a foreign language.
Information is available at your fingertips, just as advertised.

Indeed, we have to face a simple fact about
students today: As technology has evolved to provide a vast wealth of
information at any time, anywhere, cheating has never been easier.

In the good old days, cheating was a simple affair
and as a result not too difficult to track down, like the time a girl with
limited English skills in one of my high school English classes handed in a
terrifically written, sophisticated short story. She copied, word for word,
Shirley Jackson's story "Charles," except for changing the title character's
name. I guess she thought I wouldn't have a chance hunting down the story
once she cleverly renamed her story "Bob." Alas, catching a cheater is not
so easy any more.

Smartphone Photos

A few years ago, students would write the answers
on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have
students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of
the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions
before they walk into the classroom.

Now catching the cheaters requires a level of
vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National
Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher.

Today, students wouldn't have to rely merely on
CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on
Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes,
PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless
supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google
"Hamlet Essay," and you'll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first
page of which is teeming with free essays.

Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by
typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine
to discover the source. And such websites as Turnitin.com, which checks
student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work
for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are
so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy,
that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks
of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of
teachers.

Fonts of Duplicity

Of course, even in this technological age, some
students are so lazy they won't even bother to match the font and the type
size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately
cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once
told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a
website. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written
in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish.

Yet, we can't count on incompetence. Many students
are so wily and crafty that they've learned to mask their cheating to
impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking
you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical
contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover
their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative.

Jensen Comment
I became discouraged with take home exam when one of my students paid to
outsource taking of the examination to an agent. If the agent had not
plagiarized it would've been impossible to catch his boss (the enrolled
student). Most of my take home examinations, however, were only a small portion
of the grade and the heavily-weighted final examination was not a take-home
examination. I think all courses, including online courses, should have a
monitored final examination. There are ways of dealing with this in distance
education courses ---

The number of MBA applicants at UCLA’s
Anderson School of Managementthat have been
rejected because of plagiarism has grown exponentially, with 40 more
rejected in the second round of applications.

The new cases of plagiarism bring the total to 52.
As we reported yesterday,
12 cases of plagiarismwere discovered in a batch
of 870 first-round applications. An additional 40 cases were discovered in
the applications submitted for the second-round, says Elise Anderson, a
spokeswoman for the school. The third round, which has an April 18 deadline,
typically gets another 500 to 700 applications, Anderson says. So it’s
possible that more plagiarized essays will be found in the third round.

The plagiarism was discovered through the use of a
service called Turnitin for Admissions, which scans admissions essays
looking for text that matches any documents in the Turnitin database. The
archive contains billions of pages of web content, books and journals, as
well as student work previously submitted to Turnitin for a plagiarism
check. Turnitin flags any matches it finds, but individual schools determine
if the similarity constitutes plagiarism. The service is now in use by
nearly 20 business schools, including those at
Penn State, Iowa State, Northeastern, and Wake Forest.

Anderson said the school does not currently notify
applicants that their essays will be checked through Turnitin. She said the
school is determining what, if any, disclosure should be made on its web
site.

Research done by Turnitin suggests that plagiarism
in admissions essays is vast. The company's study of 453,000 "personal
statements" received by more than 300 colleges and universities in an
unnamed English-speaking country found that "more that 70,000 applicants
that applied though this system did so with statements that may not have
been their own work." That's more than 15 percent.

For schools that do not currently vet application
essays with Turnitin, the apparent prevalence of plagiarized essays raises
an interesting question: Is it ethical for a school to turn a blind eye to
this and award degrees to people who got their foot in the door by lying?

And for those that do screen essays, there's
another issue. Many students use the same essays (with minor modifications)
at every school they apply to, but there's no mechanism in place to flag
plagiarized essays discovered by one school to all the other schools where
that essay may have been submitted. One way to do this would be for the
school discovering the plagiarism to notify the Graduate Management
Admission Council, and have GMAC send a notice to every school that received
the applicant's GMAT scores.

Profanity: A Web site
promoting Oberlin College co-created by its social media
coordinator,
Why the F*** Should I Choose Oberlin?, drew varied reactions and plenty of attention
last week. The site, which notes it is not officially affiliated
with Oberlin, collects profanity-laced quotes about why Oberlin is
great. Georgy Cohen
interviews the co-creator, Ma’ayan
Plaut, who says she has “tacit and unofficial approval” from her
boss. On Higher Ed Marketing, Andrew Careaga says his inner
15-year-old thought the site is brilliant, but his 51-year-old
“shook his jaded head.”

Design: Keith Hampson argues that good
design will play an increasingly important rolein the college student experience as college
move online. “Somehow, though, digital higher education—both its
software and content—has managed to remain untouched by good design.
Design is not even on the agenda,” he says.

What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to
failure?

Computer software, threats on the syllabus, pledges of zero
tolerance, honor
codes — what if all the popular strategies don’t much matter? And what if
all of that anger you feel — as you catch students clearly submitting work
they didn’t write — is clouding your judgment and making it more difficult
to promote academic integrity?

These are
some of the questions raised in
My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture,in which Susan D. Blum, an
anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, considers
why students so frequently violate norms that seem clear and
just to their professors. The book, about to appear from
Cornell University Press, is sure to be controversial
because it challenges the strategies used by colleges and
professors nationwide. In many ways, Blum is arguing that
the current approach of higher education to plagiarism is a
shock and awe strategy — dazzle students with technology and
make them afraid, very afraid, of what could happen to them.

But since there
isn’t a Guantanamo Bay large enough for the population that
plagiarizes, Blum wants higher education to embrace more of
a hearts and minds strategy in which academics consider why
their students turn in papers as they do, and the logic
behind those choices.

The
book arrives at a time that many professors continue to
voice frustration over plagiarism. Academic blogs are full
of stories about attempting to deal with copying. Services
such as
Turnitinhave grown in popularity
to the extent that it is processing more than 130,000 papers
a day, while
Blackboardhas added plagiarism
detection features to its course management systems. At the
same time, however, particularly in the world of college
composition, there has been
some backlashagainst the law
enforcement approach, with professors saying that they fear
they are missing a chance to teach students about how to
write through too much emphasis on fear of detection.

Those who
want to understand the ideas in the book may want to note
the title; it’s no coincidence that Blum wrote about college
“culture,” and not “ethics” or “morality.” And while she did
use “plagiarism” in the title, she faults colleges and
professors for failing to distinguish between buying a paper
to submit as your own, submitting a paper containing
passages from many authors without appropriate credit, and
simply failing to learn how to cite materials. Treating
these violations of academic norms the same way is part of
the problem, she writes.

If you find
yourself thinking that Blum is advocating surrender, that’s
not correct. Her book doesn’t advocate waving a white flag,
but a new kind of campaign against plagiarism. And in an
interview, Blum said that she includes warnings against
plagiarism on her syllabuses, has devoted time trying to
track down evidence against a student she was convinced had
copied work, and has felt anger and betrayal at students who
turned in work that wasn’t original.

“That’s how
I felt when I first started looking into this topic,” she
said. “I was really hurt when I felt students didn’t show
respect for the assignment. I felt a tension between really
liking my students as individuals and that they didn’t take
academic work as seriously as I wanted them to.... I felt it
was a battle. It was ‘How can I make them care?’ “

Blum’s book
is based on her research on the way colleges try to prevent
plagiarism and the way students view college, knowledge and
the writing process. Many of the ideas come from the 234
undergraduates at Notre Dame who participated in in-depth
interviews. The students were given confidentiality and the
procedures for the interviews were approved by Notre Dame’s
institutional review board. While Blum makes clear where she
did her research, she calls the institution “Saints U.” in
the text, with the goal of having readers focus less on
Notre Dame and more on higher education generally.

While the
book doesn’t claim that Notre Dame students are broadly
representative of those in higher education, she suggests
that these students do give an accurate portrayal of
attitudes at competitive, residential colleges. Blum
originally planned a similar study at a less competitive
college, but didn’t have time to finish it. She said she
thinks there may be some differences in attitudes, as part
of the dynamic at elite institutions is a student
expectation about earning A’s and succeeding in everything —
an expectation that she said may not be present elsewhere.

In terms of
explaining student culture, Blum uses many of the student
interviews to show how education has become to many students
more an issue of credentialing and getting ahead than of any
more idealistic love of learning. She quotes one student who
admits that he sounds “awful,” in describing decidedly
unintellectual reasons for going to college and excelling
there. “I think that knowledge is important to me, and to
feel like I’m ahead of the game in a sense is important to
me. And to move on the next step, whatever it is .. is also
important.”

Students
looking for the “next step” may not care as much as they
should about actual learning, Blum suggests.

Then there
is the student concept — or lack thereof — of intellectual
property. She notes the way students routinely ignore
messages from colleges and threats of legal action to share
music online, in violation of business standards of
copyright. As with plagiarism, she notes, the student
generation has embraced an entirely different concept of
ownership, and students who would never shoplift feel no
hesitation about downloading music they haven’t purchased.

And she
notes how much students love to quote from pop culture or
other sources — feeling pride in working into conversation
quotes they never invented — in a way previous generations
wouldn’t have done.

“Student
norms contrast with official norms not just because of this
proliferation of quoting without attribution, but because
students question the very possibility of originality. They
often reveal profound insights into the nature of creation
and demonstrate a considered acceptance of sharing and
collaboration,” Blum writes. At the same time, she notes,
students are less likely than previous generation to
distinguish between formal and informal writing (think of
the importance, to students, of instant messages). And rules
about attribution are seen as silly.

Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of
community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students
from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of
social belonging among online students might help universities fight another
problem: cheating.

In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio
University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed
an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly
higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place
primarily in a classroom.

“The more distant students are, the more
disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize
cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an
interview with Inside Higher Ed.

While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a
study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are
particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark
A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus,
said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and
professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor
codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social
connections.”

Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of
deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs
has given rise to a cottage industry of
remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic
fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment
with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project
suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of
online students as a rule.)

But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more
interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so,
then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating
tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to
the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in
the online environment.

They experimented with the effectiveness of honor
codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first
course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those
in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students,
mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no
honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14
multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the
term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of
them.

The second trial involved another fully online
introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the
class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code --
posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the
other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the
term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was
the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no
family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported
cheating between the two groups.

In a third trial, the professors repeated the
experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20
percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a
traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two
groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in
which they were not.

This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the
students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference:
Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to
cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had
not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.

LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no
definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to
cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of
opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to
do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives
relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest
to police.

“The bottom line is that if there are
opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities
they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon
professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be
contained.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think universities like Trinity University that expanded their honor codes to
include student courts are generally happy with the operations of those honor
codes. However, Trinity has only full time students and no distance education
courses.

One thing that I hated giving up was grading control. For most of my teaching
career I gave F grades to students who seriously cheated in my courses. Under
the revised Trinity Honor Code, instructors can no longer control the granting
of F grades for cheating.

When I was a student at Stanford the Honor Code included a pledge to report
cheating of other students. I think most universities have watered down this
aspect of their honor codes because, in this greatly increased era of
litigation, student whistle blowers can be sued big time. Universities may
continue to encourage such whistle blowing, but they no longer make students
sign pledges that on their honor they will be whistleblowers if they do not want
to bear the risk of litigation by students they report.

Allegations of cheating
at Stanford University have more than doubled in the past decade, with the
largest number of violations involving computer science students.

In 10 years, the number
of cases investigated by the university's Judicial Panel has climbed from 52 to
123.

Stanford, one of only 100
U.S. campuses with an "honor code," established its code in 1921 to uphold
academic integrity by prohibiting plagiarism, copying work and getting outside
help. Penalties for violations include denied credit for a class, a rejected
thesis or a one-quarter suspension from the university. Students also pledge to
report cheaters and do honest work without being policed.

"There's been a very
significant increase," although the vast majority of the school's 19,000
students are honest, said Chris Griffith, chief of the Judicial Panel. More men
are reported than women, and more undergraduates than graduates.

"Some of it is due to an
increase in dishonesty," she said, "while some is due to an increase in
reporting by faculty."

The findings came from
new data presented by Griffith at a meeting of Stanford faculty at the academic
senate. Although computer science students represent 6.5 percent of Stanford's
student body, last year those students accounted for 23 percent of the
university's honor code violators.

"My feeling is that the
most important factor is the high frustration levels that typically go along
with trying to get a program

to run," said computer
science professor Eric Roberts, who has studied the problem of academic
cheating. He noted that most violations involve homework assignments rather than
exams.

"The computer is an
unforgiving arbiter of correctness," he said. "Imagine what would happen if
every time you submitted a paper for an English course, it came back with a red
circle around the first syntactic error, along with a notation saying: 'No
credit — resubmit.' After a dozen attempts all meeting the same fate, the
temptation to copy a paper you knew would pass might get pretty high. That
situation is analogous to what happens in computing courses."

A common computer science
violation occurs when students work as a team to complete an assignment, even
though the rules stipulate that work must be done individually.

Also common: students
obtaining someone else's code and submitting that version, after making simple
edits to disguise the work. They find copies by rooting through discarded
program listings taken from a recycling bin, or checking machines in public
clusters to see whether previous students left solutions lying around.

"People know exactly what
they're doing," Roberts said. "One student took code out of the 'recycle bin' of
a laptop, changed the name of the original author and used it in six of the
seven files that were submitted."

As for the problem of
cheating, Stanford is by no means alone. Roberts noted that the largest cheating
episode in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took place
in a 1991 course titled "Introduction to Computers and Problem Solving," when 73
of 239 students were disciplined for "excessive collaboration."

Today, to reveal
similarities in code, Stanford computer professors use a program called MOSS
(Measure Of Software Similarity). That software is boosting the number of
discovered violations.

Other violations,
although fewer, were found in the departments of biology and Introduction to the
Humanities. Art history had only one violation.

Universitywide, 43
percent of violations at Stanford involved "unpermitted collaboration," where
students submit work that was not done independently. About 31 percent involved
plagiarism, using Internet-based work that was not cited. Another 11 percent
involved copying work; 5 percent, receiving outside help; 5 percent,
representing others' work as their own and 5 percent, assorted violations.

The Judicial Panel's
report also noted that cheating was uncommon in professional schools, such as
law and medicine.

"When you're in
professional school at Stanford, it is foolish to cheat. If you pass, there will
be good job opportunities," said law student Eric Osborne.

"That is not as true for
undergraduates in the engineering and computer science fields," said Osborne,
"where in this economy, there is a lot of drive to get into grad school."

Jensen Comment
I would also think that there is motivation to cheat in MBA programs and law
schools where the job markets are bleak.

Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral
Deal: Yeah Right!
Although I admire Professor Fish, I don't quite share his views on plagiarism.
And even if you share his views, this may not protect you or your students from
the thunderbolts of wrath that sometimes strike plagiarists --- such
thunderbolts as loss of job, loss of a degree (yes your prized college degree
can be withdrawn), your publications may be withdrawn, you can be sued for your
life savings, and you may face a lifetime of disgrace.

The scarlet letter "P" around your neck is serious business and becomes even
worse with a record of addiction. Of course there are examples of plagiarists
who are highly regarded in spite of their plagiarism, including Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Vladimir Putin ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities

During my tenure as the dean of a college, I
determined that an underperforming program should be closed. My wife asked
me if I had ever set foot on the premises, and when I answered “no,” she
said that I really should do that before wielding the axe.

And so I did, in the company of my senior associate
dean. We toured the offices and spoke to students and staff. In the course
of a conversation, one of the program’s co-directors pressed on me his
latest book. I opened it to the concluding chapter, read the first two
pages, and remarked to my associate dean, “This is really good.”

But on the way back to the administration building,
I suddenly flashed on the pages I admired and began to suspect that the
reason I liked them so much was that I had written them. And sure enough,
when I got back to my office and pulled one of my books off the shelf, there
the pages were, practically word for word. I telephoned the co-director, and
told him that I had been looking at his book, and wanted to talk about it.
He replied eagerly that he would come right over, but when he came in I
pointed him to the two books — his and mine — set out next to each other
with the relevant passages outlined by a marker.

He turned white and said that he and his co-author
had divided the responsibilities for the book’s chapters and that he had not
written (perhaps “written” should be in quotes) this one. I contacted the
co-author and he wrote back to me something about graduate student
researchers who had given him material that was not properly identified. I
made a few half-hearted efforts to contact the book’s publisher, but I
didn’t persist and I pretty much forgot about it, although the memory
returns whenever I read yet another piece (like one that appeared recently
in The Times) about
the ubiquity of plagiarism, the failure of
students to understand what it is, the suspicion that they know what it is
but don’t care, and the outdatedness of notions like originality and single
authorship on which the intelligibility of plagiarism as a concept depends.

Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button
topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and morally inflated.
But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned
sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.

Of course every sin is learned. Very young children
do not distinguish between themselves and the world; they assume that
everything belongs to them; only in time and through the conditioning of
experience do they learn the distinction between mine and thine and so come
to acquire the concept of stealing. The concept of plagiarism, however, is
learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a few;
it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your
neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without
citing him.

The rule that you not use words that were first
uttered or written by another without due attribution is less like the rule
against stealing, which is at least culturally universal, than it is like
the rules of golf. I choose golf because its rules are so much more severe
and therefore so much odder than the rules of other sports. In baseball you
can (and should) steal bases and hide the ball. In football you can (and
should) fake a pass or throw your opponent to the ground. In basketball you
will be praised for obstructing an opposing player’s view of the court by
waving your hands in front of his face. In hockey … well let’s not go there.
But in golf, if you so much as move the ball accidentally while breathing on
it far away from anyone who might have seen what you did, you must
immediately report yourself and incur the penalty. (Think of what would
happen to the base-runner called safe at home-plate who said to the umpire,
“Excuse me, sir, but although you missed it, I failed to touch third base.”)

Golf’s rules have been called arcane and it is not
unusual to see play stopped while a P.G.A. official arrives with rule book
in hand and pronounces in the manner of an I.R.S. official. Both fans and
players are aware of how peculiar and “in-house” the rules are; knowledge of
them is what links the members of a small community, and those outside the
community (most people in the world) can be excused if they just don’t see
what the fuss is about.

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s
obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or
a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a
living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure
properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no. But if
you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although
there certainly are some) and if you’re a politician it may not occur to
you, as it did not at one time to Joe Biden, that you’re doing anything
wrong when you appropriate the speech of a revered statesman.

And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be
an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?);
for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the
irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a
knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel,
knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional
practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you
end up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that
students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not
committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the
conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice
of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I
hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our
house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is
a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

Now if plagiarism is an idea that makes sense only
in the precincts of certain specialized practices and is not a normative
philosophical notion, inquiries into its philosophical underpinnings are of
no practical interest or import. In recent years there have been a number of
assaults on the notion of originality, issuing from fields as diverse as
literary theory, history, cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology,
Internet studies. Single authorship, we have been told, is a recent
invention of a bourgeois culture obsessed with individualism, individual
rights and the myth of progress. All texts are palimpsests of earlier texts;
there’s been nothing new under the sun since Plato and Aristotle and they
weren’t new either; everything belongs to everybody. In earlier periods
works of art were produced in workshops by teams; the master artisan may
have signed them, but they were communal products. In some cultures, even
contemporary ones, the imitation of standard models is valued more than work
that sets out to be path-breaking. (This was one of the positions in the
famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in England and France in
the 17th and 18th centuries.)

Arguments like these (which I am reporting, not
endorsing) have been so successful in academic circles that the very word
“originality” often appears in quotation marks, and it has seemed to many
that there is a direct path from this line of reasoning to the conclusion
that plagiarism is an incoherent, even impossible, concept and that a writer
or artist accused of plagiarism is being faulted for doing something that
cannot be avoided. R.M. Howard makes the point succinctly “If there is no
originality and no literary property, there is no basis for the notion of
plagiarism” (“College English,” 1995).

That might be true or at least plausible if, in
order to have a basis, plagiarism would have to stand on some philosophical
ground. But the ground plagiarism stands on is more mundane and firm; it is
the ground of disciplinary practices and of the histories that have
conferred on those practices a strong, even undoubted (though revisable)
sense of what kind of work can be appropriately done and what kind of
behavior cannot be tolerated. If it is wrong to plagiarize in some context
of practice, it is not because the idea of originality has been affirmed by
deep philosophical reasoning, but because the ensemble of activities that
take place in the practice would be unintelligible if the possibility of
being original were not presupposed.

And if there should emerge a powerful philosophical
argument saying there’s no such thing as originality, its emergence needn’t
alter or even bother for a second a practice that can only get started if
originality is assumed as a baseline. It may be (to offer another example),
as I have argued elsewhere, that there’s no such thing as free speech, but
if you want to have a free speech regime because you believe that it is
essential to the maintenance of democracy, just forget what Stanley Fish
said — after all it’s just a theoretical argument — and get down to it as
lawyers and judges in fact do all the time without the benefit or hindrance
of any metaphysical rap. Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a
foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves;
no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them. As long as
the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect
and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.

This brings me back to the (true) story I began
with. Whether there is something called originality or not, the two scholars
who began their concluding chapter by reproducing two of my pages are
professionally culpable. They took something from me without asking and
without acknowledgment, and they profited — if only in the currency of
academic reputation — from work that I had done and signed. That’s the
bottom line and no fancy philosophical argument can erase it.

"Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions
derived from others."

When
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism after the publication of her
autobiography,
The Story of My Life (public
library), Mark Twain sent her
a note of solidarity and support, assuring her that "substantially
all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a
million outside sources." Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham
Bell – father of the telephone – wrote Annie Sullivan, Keller's
teacher, a
letter with a similar sentiment. Bell argued that it is "difficult
for us to trace the origin of our expressions" and "we are all of
us … unconscious plagiarists, especially in childhood" – a notion
neurologist Oliver Sacks has affirmed more than a century later with his
recent insights on
memory and plagiarism, and one the poet Kenneth Goldsmith has
institutionalized with his
class on "uncreative writing."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think in the case of students, most plagiarism investigations center around
verbatim or nearly-verbatim passages without attribution. Sometimes, as in the
case of dissertation research, focus may be placed upon suspected and non-cited
earlier ideas and possibly mathematical proofs that are sometimes relatively
easy to reformulate in slightly different ways.

The non-cited verbatim plagiarisms of other writers and composers of course
are much more difficult to justify on ethical or legal grounds. So are the
reformulated plagiarisms of ideas, although these are much more difficult to
detect and prosecute in court.

The case of a first-year
student at the University of Oxford, apparently admitted courtesy of a high
school and testing record he didn't earn, has led to increased scrutiny of the
admissions system there,
Times Higher Educationreported. The student
in question reported 10 A-grade A-level exams, a notable accomplishment in the
British system -- except that it was false. A teacher's recommendation was also
forged. The Times Higher reported that the student, who has been
suspended, was admitted through a program for applicants who are not sponsored
by schools, and that questions have been raised by critics about whether such
applicants' materials receive enough scrutiny.

I have followed ACEM and the many
daily contributions for over two years. On two occasions I have commented
back to individual professors. My name is Keith Weidkamp and I am a retired
Professor of Accounting at Sierra College in Rocklin California. For over
20 years I have worked with Professor Leland Mansuetti, and for the past
five years also with Professor Perry Edwards, developing, testing, and also
publishing web-based practice sets, homework problems, study and review
packets for Principles, Financial, Managerial, and Intermediate Accounting.
We have with limited advertising and a few conference presentations added
many schools to our adoption list. Texas A & M, Clemson, Trinity, Chicago,
Mary Harden Baylor, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and many other smaller colleges
and universities currently use one or more of our software products

As recently as yesterday and
quite often over the last few months there have been comments and
information regarding cheating and plagiarism. Over the past two
years we have been working on and have developed and tested two web-based
systems for Accounting practice sets and for Accounting homework that
virtually eliminates the copying of work, and answers to questions and
project examinations. In our first presentation a month ago at the
National TACTYC Convention in Phoenix, as the word got out regarding our new
algorithmic products and software, we had over 50 Four-year and Two-year
schools, from across the country ask for more information and an on-line
demonstration.

Our new web-based software has
added new opportunity to control a problem that has been an unfortunate
issue to deal with for many years. While
realizing that AECM is not a place to advertise, since the focus of AECM is
Accounting Education and Multi-Media, I am asking you what you would
recommend I do to get this information out to our large group professors as
an informational item.

Attached you will find two
information documents that outline our two new Algorithmic products. We
have now two algorithmic practice sets and a full set of algorithmic topical
problems (25 topics). Both of these products have the same key features.

On all practice sets each
student starts with a different set of beginning balances. A unique set of
check figures is available for each student user. Answers to key questions
at the mid-point and at the end of the project, are different for each
student. With a single click an Instructor can view the work file of any
student. With two clicks an instructor can print a copy of the student's
graded examination showing their answers and the correct answers for that
student.

On the Accounting Coach
homework and/or study software, there are 25 topics for a student to choose
from. Students are provided unlimited practice and Teacher Help screens for
every topic and sub-topic. Every homework assignment ends with a short 5-8
minute algorithmic examination. This exam is scored and the grade
automatically entered into the instructor grade book. A well-prepared
student can complete a topic assignment in 15-20 minutes. A student needing
more assistance can continue the algorithmic practice and retake the
algorithmic examination as many times as necessary to achieve a satisfactory
score.

Special Features of this
Software:

1. Cheating and copying
others work is eliminated.

2. All student work is
automatically graded and the score recorded into the instructor

grade book.

3. Each practice set and
problem has unlimited opportunity for practice, assistance,

reinforcement and
learning.

4. Student clerical time as
well as homework and practice time is significantly

reduced.

5. Instructor grading and
recording time is almost completely eliminated.

6. Direct on-line support is
provided from the Professor Authors!

The three authors of this
software have a combined classroom experience of over 75 years. They use
this software daily in their classes. Over 500 students use this software
each semester at their school.

The new web-based software,
with all of the special improvements not possible in a CD version, has
eliminated all publishing, shipping, and markup costs. All products can be
purchased via PayPal for just $19.95 per student copy.

June 13, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Keith,

I am forwarding your
message to the AECM, because I think what you’ve accomplished is probably
valuable to some instructors although not to the extent that I buy into your
claim that “cheating and copying others’ work is eliminated.”

Your pedagogy is very
limited in that it does not allow for creative solutions that differ from
your templates. This is why some instructors assign term papers rather than
practice sets. But term papers both increase and decrease opportunities to
cheat.

In very large classes, it
is often possible for surrogate students to pretend to be somebody else.

Adopters of Your
Practice Sets May Have a False Sense of SecurityYou’re assuming that clever students
(possibly advanced students) will not write answer templates such as Excel
workbooks that are archived (e.g., in a fraternity’s database). Those
templates may be just as efficient in finding solutions as your own answer
templates that you use for grading purposes.

It has long been a
practice of case-method teachers to recycle cases with changed numbers and
sometimes even changed contexts and assumptions. However, students still
find value added in having archives of the solutions answers of former
versions of a case. This is one of the things that makes case method
teaching very frustrating. It’s almost imperative to continually use new
cases rather than recycled cases.

Seeking Creative
Solutions Both Increases and Decreases Opportunities to CheatI defy anybody or any software from
detecting all forms of plagiarism. Out of trillions upon trillions of pages
of writings in history, a student can simply type in a sentence or a
paragraph or an entire page of writing that has a 99% probability of being
detected.

Unless somebody, like
Tournitin, archives student term papers and problem solutions, plagiarism
detection has more than a 99% chance of failing. For example, if a student
writes an unpublished essay at Florida International that is never archived
anywhere except in one professor’s brain, I defy you to detect its
plagiarism in unpublished term papers elsewhere in the world.

Even Turnitin cannot
archive more than a miniscule fraction of writings that have never been
digitized.

The Best Way to Prevent
CheatingThe real trick for professors is to
assign unique projects where finding works or people to plagiarize will be
an education in and of itself. For example, if I assign a project on
accounting for contango swaps in Iceland I’ve eliminated 99.99999999999% of
writings that can be safely plagiarized in a student term project at the
University of Southern California. And I defy you to find a term paper
writing service that will take this project on at reasonable prices. Of
course there is an epsilon chance of finding something or somebody to
plagiarize, but like I said doing this may be an education in and of itself.
And I think cheating on this project will be more difficult than writing an
Excel workbook for solution templates to your practice cses.

Where does responsibility for plagiarism
stop?
Is a sole author responsible for the plagiarism of assistants?
Are all co-authors responsible for the plagiarism of one of the co-authors?
Is a student responsible for plagiarism caused by the student's hired assistant?
(one of Bob Jensen's former students offered this line of defense)

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday rejected an
appeal in which Ward Churchill sought to get back his job as a tenured
professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The court's
50-page decision focused on whether the University
of Colorado had acted in a "quasi-judicial" fashion when it reviewed charges
of research misconduct against Churchill. The state's highest court ruled
that the university did act in that way, and so was entitled to immunity
from being sued, much as judges are immune from being sued for their
decisions. The university's Board of Regents
fired Churchill in 2007, based on the findings of a faculty panel,
which found that he had engaged in repeated instances of research misconduct
--including
plagiarism, fabrication and
falsification.

Churchill has maintained from the start that the
investigation and his dismissal were motivated by outrage over his political
views, and that the university had violated his First Amendment rights and
taken away his academic freedom. The Colorado Supreme Court's ruling didn't
weigh these claims directly, but several times in the opinion cited evidence
that the university's procedures gave Churchill important due process rights
and reflected the legitimate needs of a university to assure professional
conduct by its faculty members.

As the Churchill case has dragged on, the various
rulings have had an impact beyond the plaintiff. In fact, several college
associations had urged the Colorado Supreme Court to rule as it did, arguing
that failure to respect the university's quasi-judicial role would open up
many other universities to lawsuits by anyone found to have engaged in
research misconduct.

But some civil liberties and faculty groups --
including the Colorado chapter of the American Association of University
Professors -- backed Churchill. They argued that affirming the university's
quasi-judicial status would effectively enable public universities to fire
controversial professors without appropriate opportunity for them to bring
grievances to the courts. Both the college groups and the faculty
associations argued in their briefs to the court that academic freedom was
at stake in the case, although they argued for opposite outcomes.

In Monday's ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court
noted the lengthy process that the university used to investigate the
allegations against Churchill and to determine that dismissal was
appropriate. "The proceedings against Churchill took more than two years and
included five separate opportunities for Churchill to present witnesses,
cross-examine adverse witnesses, and argue his positions," the Supreme Court
opinion said. "It possessed the characteristics of an adversary proceeding
and was functionally comparable to a judicial proceeding." For this reason,
the justices ruled, the university was acting sufficiently closely to the
judicial function of government that it was immune from being sued.

The ruling cited a series of procedural and
fairness tests in case law to determine whether the Board of Regents acted
in a judicial manner, and said that the governing board met all the relevant
tests. While that finding was the crucial one, various parts of the decision
also suggested that the Supreme Court viewed the findings against Churchill
to be reasonable ones. For instance, the Supreme Court said that the trial
judge in the case -- who rejected Churchill's request for reinstatement --
had acted on the basis of "credible evidence" about Churchill's conduct.

An Inflammatory Essay and Its Aftermath

The University of Colorado hired Churchill in 1991,
and promoted him to full professor in 1997. He was active in Native American
political movements, and gave lectures on college campuses nationwide --
regularly criticizing U.S. policies but doing so largely without attention
in the mainstream press.

Then early in 2005, he became a flashpoint in the
culture wars. He had been invited to give a talk at Hamilton College -- the
kind of speaking invitation Churchill had accepted for years. Hamilton
professors unhappy about the invitation circulated some of his writings,
including the now-notorious
"little Eichmanns" speech in which he derided the
people killed at the World Trade Center on September 11.

The attention led both to calls for Colorado to
fire him and to reports of incidents of research misconduct. The university
said it couldn't fire him for the essay, but could investigate the
allegations -- and that started the process that was reviewed by the
Colorado Supreme Court.

David A. Lane, Churchill's lawyer, issued a
statement blasting the decision and vowing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme
Court.

Continued in article

Ward Churchill, who is
suing the University of Colorado at Boulder to get his job back, admitted on
Tuesday that portions of a book he edited and wrote parts of were plagiarized,
but he said he wasn't responsible for doing so,
9 News reported. "Plagiarism occurred," Churchill said
in reference to the writings. But Churchill (who prefers to be called "Doctor"
Churchill) said that others who were involved in the project did the
plagiarizing and that he was unaware of it. Churchill has generally not
admitted that any plagiarism occurred in his work, arguing that minor errors
have been stretched by the university to fire him for his controversial
political views. University of Colorado officials also asked Churchill on
Tuesday why he had indicated that he wanted to be called "Dr. Churchill" when he
has only a master's degree. Churchill responded that he has an honorary
doctorate and asked the lawyer, "You wish to dishonor it?" The
Denver Postnoted that while there were some sharp
exchanges in the testimony, much of it was detailed discussion of sources and
the details of scholarly writing, and that the judge had to call a recess at one
point when a juror appeared to be having difficulty staying awake."Churchill: 'Plagiarism Occurred' (But He Didn't Do It)
Jensen Comment
If Doctor Churchill pursues this babe-in-the woods line of defense it seems to
me he should name the plagiarists who led him on.

One of the most liberal academic associations is
the highly liberal Modern Language Association. However, even the MLA could not
muster up a vote critical of the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of
Colorado.While material distributed by those seeking to condemn
Churchill’s firing portrayed him favorably, and as a victim of the right wing,
some of those who criticized the pro-Churchill effort at the meeting are
long-time experts in Native American studies and decidedly not conservative.Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/mla

Question
What does a leading Native American scholar think of Ward
Churchill's scholarship and integrity?

And this
was the judgment of Churchill's academic peers. UCLA professor
Russell Thornton, a Cherokee tribe member whose work was
misrepresented by Churchill, said "I don't see how the
University of Colorado can keep him with a straight face,"
calling his material on smallpox a "fabrication" of history, and
accusing him of "gross, gross scholarly misconduct." Real
American Indian history, he told the Rocky Mountain News, is
vitally important, not "a bunch of B.S. that someone made up."
R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the
American Indian and another scholar who has accused Churchill of
misrepresenting his work, says that he's "happy that [he was
fired], that he's been found out, and by his peers—meaning other
university people—and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and
a liar." Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar
University who has also investigated Churchill's smallpox
research, said his work on the subject is "fabricated almost
entirely from scratch." Michael C. Moynihan, "Ward of the State: Why the
state of Colorado was right to sack Ward Churchill," Reason
Magazine, August 1, 2007 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121682.html

A huge factor in the granting of tenure to Ward
Churchill was purportedly his affirmative action claim of being Native American.
Bob Jensen's threads on Doctor Churchill, the "Cherokee Wannabe" who most likely
does not have drop of Native American blood, are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm

Jensen Comment
The outcome of this appeal could have wide-ranging implications in terms of a
college's authority to terminate a plagiarizing tenured faculty member. I hope
that the University of Colorado appeals this to the U.S. Supreme Court if the
Colorado Supreme Court rules in favor of Churchill.

Dartmouth College has accused 64 students of
cheating in a “Sports, Ethics, and Religion” course taught last fall, the Valley
Newsreports. Randall
Balmer, chairman of the religion department, discovered in October that
absent students in his class were passing their clickers to classmates who
were present to answer in-class questions on their behalf.

Mr. Balmer told the newspaper that most of the
students involved had been suspended for a semester. In the fall he counted
43 students who handed off their clickers in the roughly 275-person class,
but that number does not include the students who facilitated the cheating.

The popular class was initially designed to help
the college’s athletes, many of whom struggled with freshman-year
coursework.

Diana Lawrence, a spokeswoman for the college, said
it would not offer more-detailed comment on the proceedings until the
appeals process ends this month.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
It would be interesting to know the grading distribution in this course. My
hypothesis is that students are more apt to skip class and cheat in a course
where they are assured of an A grade with very little effort. This is what
happened when over 120 students cheated in a political science course assignment
at Harvard University. All students in that course were assured of getting A
grades such that there's less incentive to work hard in the course. In Harvard's
case over half the cheaters were expelled from the University. It appears that
Dartmouth College will be a little less harsh.

China’s students have apparently developed skills for
building cheating devices to use during an SAT-like exam that look like they
have been pulled straight from a James Bond movie.

Ahead ofChina’s
massive college entrance exam — the Gaokao — that took
place on Saturday and Sunday, local media outletsreleased
photos of cheating devices confiscated by police
around the country in recent weeks.

The photos show intricate cheating equipment, a
majority of which werecreated
by students in the southwestern city of Chengdu
before taking a different test, the National Professional and Technological
Personnel Qualification Examination.

Around 40 students, all originally from Shanghai,
were reportedly caught with the devices, which were disguised to look like
everyday objects.

Some of the uncovered equipment included miniature
cameras installed into both a pen and a set of glasses, as well as wireless
earphones resembling small earplugs. In one instance, a grey tank top was
wired with a plug capable of connecting to a mobile phone that could be used
to send out information. There was also a camera installed in the shirt.

“Cheating happens in every country, but it’s
extremely rampant in China," Yong Zhao, the presidential chair at the
University of Oregon's College of Education, told VICE News. "This isn’t the
first time and it won’t be the last.”

Cheating has been an enduring issue in China, where
the emphasis placed on standardized tests can create high-pressure
environments.

“For over a thousand years China has been using
tests,” Zhao said. “Standardized tests tend to be the only way for upward
social mobility, passing the test has been a way to change people’s lives.”

Ahead of this year’s exam, which was taken by
nearly 9.4 million students across the country, Beijing was preparing to
send police out to monitor and handle cheating incidents.

In fact, students practically expect to be able to
cheat on exams.

During protests last summer against a crackdown on
Gaokao cheating, students chanted, "We want fairness. There is no fairness
if you do not let us cheat."

The Gaokao is China’s SAT or A-level equivalent,
with many students' chances at matriculating into college reliant on their
exam results.

One of this year's essay questions from a Shanghai
version of the test translated into English reads: "You can choose your own
road and method to make it across the desert, which means you are free; you
have no choice but finding a way to make it across the desert, which makes
you not free.Choose your own angle and title to write an article that is not
less than 800 words."

A Dallas-based company that writes research
papers, essays and other classroom assignments -- so students don't have
to -- says it is doing so well that it has expanded its staff from just
a few writers to more than 100 in the past year.

The company bills itself as the one "students trust to write
professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to
face the burden of academic coursework."

It says the writing is done for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign
writers on staff for non-American students.

In a news release announcing the "custom writing service" for students
in the United States, the company includes the following testimonial:

"I enjoyed using the service," one student is quoted as saying. "The
paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so
am I."

Other testimonials on the company's website read:

"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they
can find a writer with a relevant academic background...But yes, they
did! It seems like she read my thoughts and written the paper (sic) as
if I did it myself, lol :-)"

And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a
few typos, but that’s okay."

The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15
percent after 20 orders.

In August, President Obama announced his plan to tie federal financial
aid to colleges and universities that do well in a yet-to-be-announced
college rating system. As
CNSNews.com reported at the time, the rating system means the
government will define what a good college is. - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#sthash.dAvEF9OY.dpuf

A Dallas-based company that
writes research papers, essays and other classroom assignments -- so
students don't have to -- says it is doing so well that it has expanded its
staff from just a few writers to more than 100 in the past year.

The company bills itself as
the one "students trust to write professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free
essays that receive the highest grades for all levels of coursework...so
they no longer have to face the burden of academic coursework."

It says the writing is done
for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign writers on staff for
non-American students.

In a news release announcing
the "custom writing service" for students in the United States, the company
includes the following testimonial:

"I enjoyed using the
service," one student is quoted as saying. "The paper was written excellent
(sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so am I."

Other testimonials on the
company's website read:

"I've sent the paper to
evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they can find a writer with a
relevant academic background...But yes, they did! It seems like she read my
thoughts and written the paper (sic) as if I did it myself, lol :-)"

And this: "Cool essay.
Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a few typos, but that’s okay."

The company offers discounts
of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15 percent after 20 orders.

Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher, has
announced that it will stop selling “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” by
Alex Malarkey and his father, Kevin Malarkey.

The best-selling book, first published in 2010,
purports to describe what Alex experienced while he lay in a coma after a
car accident when he was 6 years old. The coma lasted two months, and his
injuries left him paralyzed, but the subsequent spiritual memoir – with its
assuring description of “miracles, angels, and life beyond This World” –
became part of a popular genre of “heavenly tourism.”

Earlier this week, Alex recanted his
testimony about the afterlife. In an open letter to Christian bookstores
posted on the Pulpit and Pen Web
site, Alex states flatly: “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven.”

Referring to the injuries that continue to make it
difficult for him to express himself, Alex writes, “Please forgive the
brevity, but because of my limitations I have to keep this short. … I said I
went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the
claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from
lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The
Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be
infallible.”

Thursday evening, Todd Starowitz, public relations
director of Tyndale House, told The Washington Post: “Tyndale has decided to
take the book and related ancillary products out of print.”

On Friday, Tyndale released this statement: “We are
saddened to learn that Alex Malarkey, co-author of ‘The Boy Who Came Back
from Heaven,’ is now saying that he made up the story of dying and going to
heaven. Given this information, we are taking the book out of print.”

But there is considerable disagreement about when
Alex first recanted his testimony and objected to the book, which has
reportedly sold more than 1 million copies.

Last April, Alex’s mother, Beth Malarkey, posted a
statement on
her own blogdecrying the memoir and its
promotion: “It is both puzzling and painful to watch the book ‘The Boy Who
Came Back from Heaven’ not only continue to sell, but to continue, for the
most part, to not be questioned.” She goes on to say that the book is not
“Biblically sound” and that her son’s objections to it were ignored and
repressed. She also notes that Alex “has not received monies from the book
nor have a majority of his needs been funded by it.”

While many studies have examined cheating among
college students, new research looks at the issue from a different
perspective – identifying students who are least likely to cheat.

The study of students at one Ohio university found
that students who scored high on measures of courage, empathy and honesty
were less likely than others to report their cheating in the past – or
intending to cheat in the future.

Moreover, those students who reported less cheating
were also less likely to believe that their fellow students regularly
committed academic dishonesty.

People who don’t cheat “have a more positive view
of others,” said Sara Staats, co-author of the research and professor of
psychology at Ohio State University’s Newark campus.

“They don’t see as much difference between
themselves and others.”

In contrast, those who scored lower on courage,
empathy and honesty – and who are more likely to report that they have
cheated -- see other students as cheating much more often than they do,
rationalizing their own behavior, Staats said.

The issue is important because most recent studies
suggest cheating is common on college campuses. Typically, more than half –
and sometimes up to 80 percent – of college students report that they have
cheated.

Staats conducted the research with Julie Hupp,
assistant professor of psychology and Heidi Wallace, an undergraduate
psychology student, both at Ohio State-Newark.

They presented their results Aug. 16 and 17 in
Boston at two poster sessions at the annual meeting of the American
Psychological Association.

Staats said this continuing research project aimed
to find out more about the students who don’t cheat – a group that Staats
and her colleagues called “academic heroes.”

“Students who don’t cheat seem to be in the
minority, and have plenty of opportunities to see their peers cheat and
receive the rewards with little risk of punishment,” Staats said. “We see
avoiding cheating as a form of everyday heroism in an academic setting.”

The research presented at APA involved two separate
but related studies done among undergraduates at Ohio State’s Newark campus.
One study included 383 students and another 73 students.

The students completed measures that examined their
bravery, honesty and empathy. The researchers separated those who scored in
the top half of those measures and contrasted them with those in the bottom
half.

Those who scored in the top half – whom the
researchers called “academic heroes” – were less likely to have reported
cheating in the past 30 days and the last year compared to the non-heroes.
They also indicated they would be less likely to cheat in the next 30 days
in one of their classes.

The academic heroes also reported they would feel
more guilt if they cheated compared to non-heroes.

“The heroes didn’t rationalize cheating the way
others did, they didn’t come up with excuses and say it was OK because lots
of other students were doing it,” Staats said.

Staats said one reason to study cheating at
colleges and universities is to try to figure out ways to reduce academic
dishonesty. The results from this research suggest a good target audience
for anti-cheating messages.

When the researchers asked students if they
intended to cheat in the future, nearly half -- 47 percent -- said they did
not intend to cheat but nearly one in four -- 24 percent -- agreed or
strongly agreed that they would cheat.

The remaining 29 percent indicated that they were
uncertain whether or not they would cheat.

“These 29 percent are like undecided voters – they
would be an especially good focus for intervention,” Staats said. “Our
results suggest that interventions may have a real opportunity to influence
at least a quarter of the student population.”

Staats said more work needs to be done to identify
the best ways to prevent cheating. But this research, with its focus on
positive psychology, suggests one avenue, she said.

“We need to do more to recognize integrity among
our students, and find ways to tap into the bravery, honest and empathy that
was found in the academic heroes in our study,” she said.

Jensen Comment
I think cheating in school is much like accounting fraud in adulthood. The
psychological factors interact heavily with situational factors such as the
"tone at the top," particular pressures at the time, crowd psychology, and
opportunity. In particular there's something to the statement that "since others
were doing it, I also tried it."

Note in particular how many athletes, especially baseball players, succumbed
to use of illegal performance enhancing drugs because they were aware that other
top players were using such drugs.

There is also the circumstance of easy opportunity. I've previously mentioned
that one daydream I repeatedly had, when I was riding my horse through about
100,000 acres of woods north of Tallahassee, centered on what I would do if I
found suitcase full of cash hidden in those woods. This is analogous to having
fraternity files of former examinations given by a professors who tend to repeat
old questions and problems. Students who in most circumstances would not cheat
might succumb under particularly easy opportunities that give them somewhat of
an unfair advantage. Some might not even see looking at old examinations as
cheating. Alas I never found a suitcase full of money.

An accounting professor at Trinity University was disturbed to learn that one
student had purchased (on eBay) the examination test bank for the textbook she
was using in a course. Some students shared using that test bank including some
students who probably would not have cheated if the act had not become so darned
easy and convenient.

One of the negative externalities of the Internet is that students now have
more and more opportunities to cheat that did not exist when information at
their fingertips did not double every 12 hours on the Internet.

A new study by researchers at Vanderbilt University
in Nashville and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City
suggests a biological explanation for why certain people tend to live life
on the edge — it involves the neurotransmitter dopamine, the brain's
feel-good chemical.

Dopamine is responsible for making us feel
satisfied after a filling meal, happy when our favorite football team wins
....It's also responsible for the high we feel when we do something
daring,...skydiving out of a plane. In the risk taker's brain, researchers
report in the Journal of Neuroscience, there appear to be fewer
dopamine-inhibiting receptors — meaning that daredevils' brains are more
saturated with the chemical, predisposing them to keep taking risks and
chasing the next high.....

The findings support Zald's theory that people who
take risks get an unusually big hit of dopamine each time they have a novel
experience, because their brains are not able to inhibit the
neurotransmitter adequately. That blast makes them feel good, so they keep
returning for the rush from similarly risky or new behaviors, just like the
addict seeking the next high...."It's a piece of the puzzle to understanding
why we like novelty, and why we get addicted to substances ... Dopamine is
an important piece of reward.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Be that as it may, some risk takers are merely trying to recover or at least
average out losses which, if successful, is more of a relief than a thrill. The
St. Petersburg Paradox may be more as a recovery strategy than a thrill ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
Bernie Madoff probably got dopamine surges from his villas, Penthouses, and
thrills of scamming investors, but at some point he might've been speculating
recklessly in options derivatives in a panic to save his butt. The same might be
said for any gambling addict who first gets "doped up" on the edge, and then
bets more recklessly by betting the farm at miserable odds when "sobered up."

Apparently Bernie is now going to plead insanity. I think that's great
defense as long as the court insists on long-term confinement as a pauper in
Belleview rather than a posh psychiatric hospital ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellevue_Hospital

This may be a reason why some students, certainly not all, cheat for a better
grade. Just the thrill of getting away with breaking the rules may lead to a
dopamine surge just like a person who shoplifts an item that she/he neither
needs nor wants. In my small hometown in Iowa, the wife of a high school coach,
an other very dignified woman, was addicted to shop lifting items that she
really didn't need or want. Our coach made an arrangement with downtown
merchants to simply bill him for items that she thought she purloined without
payment. The merchants kept a sharp and silent watch on her whenever she entered
their stores.

How could there not be some plagiarism on Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia
for that matter having thousands of module authors or, in the case of Wikipedia,
millions of anonymous authors?

A problem for hard copy encyclopedias is that they are commercial (seeking
profits) and printed on paper such that detected plagiarisms cannot be
eliminated in the books that are already shelved around the world. Wikipedia has
two advantages. Firstly, it's non-profit and secondly it's only online such that
detected plagiarisms can be, and are, eliminated immediately. Another advantage
is that in most instances of plagiarism online, the legal practice is generally
to first request removal before filing any lawsuits. Lawsuits are usually
filed when there are demonstrable money damages for breach of copyright,
especially continued breach of copyright. This most likely, in the case of
Wikipedia, is very hard to demonstrate to a sufficient degree in court to
justify the cost of an army of lawyers needed to take it to court.

The fact that YouTube and Wikipedia continue to survive indicates that
lawsuits have not yet destroyed these services. Of course YouTube, unlike
Wikipedia, is a for-profit site owned by Google. Wikipedia is non-profit. I
suspect that keeping porn and personal libel stuff out of these two sites is a
bigger problem than plagiarism.

This site examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia. We
are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on
what passes for reliable information. Search engines rank their pages near
the top. While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped
site on the web. Scrapers need content — any content will do — in order to
carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire effect is turning
Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily Google's fault, since
Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the issue of scraping even if
they wanted to. Google doesn't care; their ad money comes right off the top.

For example, it did not take long, using the Google
and Yahoo engines, to find 52 different domains that scraped Wikipedia's
page on rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Interestingly, Google listed more than
four times the number of duplicate scrapes than Yahoo. This could be related
to the fact that 83 percent of these scraped pages carry ads — almost always
ads from Google. Some of these scrapes are template-generated across
different domains, suggesting that they are created by programs. At that
point zombie PCs might be dispatched to click on the ads.

Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, probably
approves of this practice. After he made a fortune in futures trading, he
started up Bomis.com in the mid-1990s. Bomis was one of the first sites to
scrape the ad-free Open Directory Project, and turn it into a huge mass of
paid links and ads, mixed together with porn.

Another problem is that most of the administrators
at Wikipedia prefer to exercise their police functions anonymously. The
process itself is open, but the identities of the administrators are usually
cloaked behind a username and a Gmail address. (Gmail does not show an
originating IP address in the email headers, which means that you cannot
geolocate the originator, or even know whether one administrator is really a
different person than another administrator.) If an admin has a political or
personal agenda, he can do a fair amount of damage with the special editing
tools available to him. The victim may not even find out that this is
happening until it's too late. From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a
virus by search engines and other scrapers, and the damage is amplified by
orders of magnitude. There is no recourse for the victim, and no one can be
held accountable. Once it's all over the web, no one has the power to put it
back into the bottle.

Studies suggest plagiarism at about 1-3% for Wikipedia modules but I don't
put much faith on this estimate because Wikipedia is such a dynamic and changing
database.

There is also an enormous denominator effect
due to the massive volume of sentences (billions and billions?) that are not
plagiarized such that dividing by such a number is almost like dividing by
infinity.

Another reason my one percent figure is
conservative is that my average of 2.38 sentences per article undoubtedly
missed a lot of plagiarized content. If the entire Wikipedia article was
plagiarized, I should have caught it. But frequently a couple of paragraphs
only are plagiarized, and my sentences could have been from non-plagiarized
portions of the Wikipedia article. Finally, I assumed that the original
content was still online, and that Google indexed it, and that Google's
algorithm performed well enough to produce it.

... the University will look at such factors as
whether the violation is intentional, whether any advantage is gained
(e.g., recruiting, competitive or for the student-athlete involved),
whether a student-athlete's eligibility is affected and whether
violations are recurring.

... the University will look at such factors as
whether the violation is intentional, whether any advantage is gained
(e.g., recruiting, competitive, or for the student-athlete involved),
whether a student-athlete's eligibility is affected, and whether
violations are recurring.

It does not take long to find similar instances in the wordings at different
universities for codes of ethics, faculty handbooks, student handbooks, medical
policies, athletics policies, etc. If I were assigned the task of writing my
university's documents in this regard of course I would examine the related
documents of other universities. Since this would be a legal document not
written in my name I might even be tempted to "cookie cut" phrases because of
the commonplace nature of "cookie cutter" phrases in legal documents.

My point is that it's commonplace to plagiarize in legal documents.
I think such "plagiarism" is extremely common in the law profession in general.
An illustration can be found in the "cookie cutter" lawsuits where only the
names and places are changed. Law firms extensively plagiarize to a point where
it is probably no longer considered unethica

This is a very comprehensive CQ
Researcher edition dated September 19, 2003

THE ISSUES

775 Has the Internet
increased the incidence of plagiarism among students?
Should teachers use
plagiarism-detection services?
Are news organizations
doing enough to guard against plagiarism and other types of journalistic
fraud?

BACKGROUND

782 Imitation Encouraged Plagiarism had not always
been regarded as unethical.

784 Rise of Copyright Attitudes about
plagiarism began to change after the printing press was invented.

785 'Fertile Ground' Rising college
admissions in the mid-1800s led to more writing assignments--and more chances
to cheat.

786 Second Chances Some journalists who were
caught plagiarizing recovered from their mistakes.

CURRENT SITUATION

787 Plagiarism and Politics Sen. Joseph Biden,
D-Del., is among the politicians who got caught plagiarizing.

Cheating has made headlines again in recent weeks with investigations at
Dartmouth College and Duke University. The details of the two cases are
different, but both involve alleged violations by many students in a single
course, suddenly thrusting the instructors into the high-profile role of
guarding their institution’s academic rigor.

At Dartmouth, a religion professor noticed a
discrepancy between the number of students answering questions with clickers
and the number who appeared to be in the room in his "Sports, Ethics, and
Religion" course. After a bit of sleuthing, the professor, Randall Balmer,
determined that some students were using the clickers for other students to
make it appear that the absent students were showing up and completing
in-class work—a violation of the college’sAcademic
Honor Principle.(See
timeline.)

So while he did not relish the duty, Mr. Balmer felt obliged to report the
incident. "If students are obligated to abide by the terms of the honor
code," he figured, "professors are as well."

At Duke, meanwhile, the investigation involves
assignments submitted by "a number of students" that were suspiciously
similar to the solutions available online or to the work of other students.
Each of the hundreds of students who took the course, in computer science,
last spring or who are enrolled in it now received anemailsaying
they might receive a lighter academic penalty if they came forward now and
confessed to cheating rather than be investigated. (The email was first
reported by the student newspaper,The
Chronicle.)

The university and the visiting professor who informed officials of the
incident both declined to comment because the investigation is still in
progress.

Cheating is widespread, experts say, and it could happen in any professor’s
class. So what should you do if it happens in yours? Here’s what the experts
say:

How common is cheating?

Surveys suggest that some students will try to cheat even when professors do
everything right, says Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center
for Academic Integrity. Researchers estimate that about 20 percent of
students won’t cheat, regardless of the environment they’re in. Another 20
percent will try to cheat even if professors take extra precautions. But,
Ms. Fishman says, "the great big middle you can influence."

Can cheating be stopped before it
starts?

To a point. Students tend to regard cheating as a "victimless crime," Ms.
Fishman says. Teaching them that cheating does matter and has real-world
consequences can make a difference, she argues. It helps, for instance, to
explain that if a college gets a reputation for graduating students without
the skills they’re supposed to have, it will cheapen everyone’s degree.

Professors can also reduce the chance students will cheat by conveying that
they care about their students, and by having them sign a statement saying
their work is their own before they take a test, Ms. Fishman says.

It also helps, she says, if professors monitor an examination from the back
of the room instead of from the front: "It’s completely simple and
low-tech." Low-tech solutions are good, Ms. Fishman says, because
"professors cannot out-tech their students."

Good course design that accounts for the technology students use also helps,
says Tricia Bertram Gallant, the center’s outreach coordinator. Still, she
says, the goal is not to make cheating impossible. Ideally, it’s something
students will choose not to do.

I think students might be cheating in my
class. What should I do?

Professors who suspect students of cheating might investigate on their own,
as Mr. Balmer did at Dartmouth, as long as they can do so without violating
students’ privacy, says James M. Lang, a professor of English and director
of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. (He is also a
regular contributor toThe
Chronicle of Higher Education’s Advice section.)

Jensen Comment
The best-known cheating incident took place in a political science course at
Harvard where 60% of the students were expelled from Harvard because of cheating
in a course where every student who did minimal work was assured of getting an
A. I suspect the students cheated because added effort in the course would not
improve their grades.

A free-textbook company
that was sued last yearby three major textbook
publishers has now rewritten the content it was accused of stealing.

Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher
Education filed a joint complaint in March 2012 against the company, known
as Boundless. The publishers asserted that the way Boundless creates its
textbooks violates their copyrights. In a process called “alignment,”
students select the traditional text they need, and Boundless pulls together
open content to create free versions of the books.

The publishers say the resulting products too
closely mirror the original texts, specifically the way the new books are
organized. Matt Oppenheim, a lawyer representing the publishers, said
Boundless was simply stealing the substance of his clients’ textbooks.

“They were stripping out the entirety of a book’s
structure and organization, topic by topic, subtopic by subtopic, and using
it to create a skeleton that they then told the world was a version of a
publisher’s book,” he said.

The lawsuit, he said, would continue.

Ariel Diaz, chief executive of Boundless, said the
rewritten versions were just part of a continuing process of improving the
company’s products, and were not a response to the lawsuit. The company
stands by the original versions of its textbooks and its defense, he said.

Everyone can use Wikipedia's work with a few conditions

Wikipedia has taken a cue from the
free software community (which includes projects like
GNU,
Linux and
Mozilla Firefox) and has done away with traditional copyright
restrictions on our content. Instead, we've adopted what is known as a "free
content license" (specifically, a choice between the
CC-BY-SA and the
GFDL): all text and composition created by our users is and will always
remain free for anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute. We only insist
that you credit the contributors and that you do not impose new restrictions
on the work or on any improvements you make to it. Many of the images,
videos, and other media on the site are also under free licenses, or in the
public domain. Just check a file's
description page to see its licensing terms.

Note that I am not a copyright lawyer, But in my humble opinion there's a
huge difference between reproducing parts of works by commercial authors
versus non-commercial authors. In the case of non-commercial authors like myself
copyright holders almost always contact these authors to cease and desist
without commencing frightful lawsuits. There are millions of quotations at my
Website and only twice did somebody ask me to remove quotations. One was a a guy
cleared of fraud charges who no longer wanted newspaper quotations on the
Web linking his name with allegations of fraud. The other was a woman who
thought my quotations of her work were too long. After I removed them, however,
she politely contacted me requesting that I put them back into my Web pages.

I do follow certain personal guidelines. I rarely quote an entire piece
without permission. Yeah there are times when I quote very short newspaper items
like editorial opinions in their entirety, but the WSJ never seems to mind.

There are some things that cannot be reproduced in part such as cartoons. I
generally avoid putting cartoons at my Website. Those that you find an my
Website were copied with permission. I'm not quite so fussy about personal email
messages where I do forward cartoons, but if I'm going to put them into a Web
server I become much more cautious.

As a rule copyright holders cannot prevent you from quoting their published
works as long as the quotations are short in length. One of the main reasons is
that authors cannot use copyright law to put their works above criticism.
Sometimes it's really not effective to criticize a work without quoting some
parts of that work.

Audio and video reproductions have their own complications. Generally the
DMCA allows 30 second reproductions without having to seek permission in every
instance. This allows radio and television shows to reproduce short blurbs
without having to seek permission in every instance. But the DMCA makes
exceptions if the particular 30 seconds is the only part of great value in the
entire piece such as a few seconds of video of a Dallas parade showing the
bullet passing through the head of President Kennedy.

Lastly writers like me should beware of becoming too complacent about getting
away with long quotations. It's a little like overstating deductions to
charities on a tax return. Just because you get away with such overstatements
annually for 40 years does not make it legal. Also just because copyright
holders do not complain about my lengthy quotations does not mean that I've not
set a bad example for others to follow.

On the other hand, I've also encountered others who become overly cautious
about copyright laws. I view them as drivers education teachers who never exceed
45 miles per hour on an Interstate highway. They set a bad example, especially
for their drivers education students, even if what they do is perfectly legal.

A University of Toronto professor’s assignment that
asked students to add content to Wikipedia backfired when a contingent of
the Web site’s volunteer editors began raising concerns about the raft of
new contributions, according to the
Canadian Press.

The professor, Steve Joordens, had asked the 1,900
students in his introductory-psychology course to add information to
relevant Wikipedia pages, in an effort to improve the site and to teach the
students about sharing information. But the new contributions alarmed a
group of Wikipedia’s editors, who said the additions came from individuals
who did not possess the relevant expertise.

Some community members raised concerns that the
contributions had been plagiarized, and others called the assignment an
unnecessary burden on the site’s editors. Mr. Joordens defended his
students, saying that only a small fraction of their contributions had been
flagged for problems, the news service reported.

A spokesman for the foundation that operates
Wikipedia told the news service that the professor had had some preliminary
discussions with the site’s leaders before carrying out the assignment,
which the spokesman described as “experimental.” He said the Wikipedia
community’s fast response is one of the factors that makes the site
attractive to educators.

The professor said he would limit the number of
students who take on such assignments in the future and make sure that
they’re familiar with the site’s editing practices.

This cheat cannot be an expert on everything
without becoming a very good plagiarist, and even then he probably does not
have a clue about specialty topics that can be plagiarized. My guess is that
he's never heard of XBRL, FAS 138, IAS 9, FIN 48, or FAS 157. So as long as
you stick to tough and narrow topics, chances are he will refuse offers to
write on such technical topics.

Our worry is that when he or she retires from ghost
writing, this cheat will form a sizable company comprised of technical
experts that can write/plagiarize on many more specialized topics.

A Dallas-based company that writes research papers, essays and other
classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says it is doing
so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers to more
than 100 in the past year.

The company bills itself as the one "students trust to write
professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to
face the burden of academic coursework."

It says the writing is done for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign
writers on staff for non-American students.

In a news release announcing the "custom writing service" for students
in the United States, the company includes the following testimonial:

"I enjoyed using the service," one student is quoted as saying. "The
paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so
am I."

Other testimonials on the company's website read:

"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they
can find a writer with a relevant academic background...But yes, they
did! It seems like she read my thoughts and written the paper (sic) as
if I did it myself, lol :-)"

And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a
few typos, but that’s okay."

The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15
percent after 20 orders.

In August, President Obama announced his plan to tie federal financial
aid to colleges and universities that do well in a yet-to-be-announced
college rating system. As
CNSNews.com reported at the time, the rating system means the
government will define what a good college is. - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#sthash.dAvEF9OY.dpuf

A Dallas-based company that writes research papers,
essays and other classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says
it is doing so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers
to more than 100 in the past year.

The company bills itself as the one "students trust
to write professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to face
the burden of academic coursework."

It says the writing is done for an "affordable"
fee; and it has foreign writers on staff for non-American students.

In a news release announcing the "custom writing
service" for students in the United States, the company includes the
following testimonial:

"I enjoyed using the service," one student is
quoted as saying. "The paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was
satisfied, and so am I."

Other testimonials on the company's website read:

"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I
wasn't sure if they can find a writer with a relevant academic
background...But yes, they did! It seems like she read my thoughts and
written the paper (sic) as if I did it myself, lol :-)"

And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better
(sic). Just noticed a few typos, but that’s okay."

The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten
orders; and 15 percent after 20 orders.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
One such company in Dallas is http://ownessays.com/
I did not find writers listing knowledge of accounting, but some advertise
expertise in finance and global finance.

I don't trust the promise of "no plagiarism" although the plagiarism may be
very clever.

Apparently a large part of the business is writing customized college
admissions essays.

"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill,"
by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 ---
Click Here

Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda
Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale.
And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same
scenario has played out many times before.

The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web
sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work
and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.

For the first time, however, those who find
unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal
retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making
its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider
liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site
is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.

Essay mills often provide their own written works.

Darn! It’s hard for us accounting professors to pad our resumes.
I could not find a single essay to purchase on accounting for derivative
financial instruments or variable interest entities.

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy
student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper
on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric
cars.

Screen after screen, assignment after
assignment—hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come
from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community
colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others
request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from
the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former
essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company,
tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The
company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called custom essays, meaning that
its employees will write a paper to a student's specifications for a
per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are
invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What's
surprising is how sophisticated and international they've become, not to
mention profitable.

In a previous era, you might have found an
essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll
find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in
Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their
administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to
outsource their academic work.

And if the exponential surge in the number
of essay mills is any indication, the problem is only getting worse. But
who, exactly, is running these companies? And what do the students who use
their services have to say for themselves?

Go to Google and type "buy an essay."
Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is "Providing
Students with Original Papers since 1997." It's a professional-looking site
with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of
satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver "quality custom written
papers" by writers with either a master's degree or a Ph.D. Prices range
from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.

To place an order, you describe your
assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter
your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in
your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in.
Simple.

What's going on behind the scenes,
however, is another story.

The address listed on the site is in
Reston, Va. But it turns out that's the address of a company that allows
clients to rent "virtual office space" — in other words, to claim they're
somewhere they're not. A previous address used by Best Essays was a UPS
store in an upscale strip mall. And while the phone number for Best Essays
has a Virginia area code, that line is registered to a company that allows
customers to forward calls anywhere in the world over the Internet.

The same contact information appears on
multiple other essay-mill Web sites with names like Rush Essay, Superior
Papers, and Best Term Paper. All of these sites are operated by Universal
Research Inc., also known as Essay Writers. The "US/Canada Headquarters" for
the company, according to yet another Web site, is in Herndon, Va. An Essay
Writers representative told a reporter that the company's North American
headquarters was a seven-story building with an attached garage and valet
parking.

That was a lie. Drive to the address, and
you will find a perfectly ordinary suburban home with a neatly trimmed front
lawn and a two-car garage. The owner of the house is Victor Guevara and,
ever since he bought it in 2004, he has received lots of strange mail. For
instance, a calendar recently arrived titled "A Stroll Through Ukrainian
Cities," featuring photographs of notable buildings in Odessa and Yalta. Not
all of the missives, however, have been so benign. Once a police officer
came to the door bearing a complaint from a man in India who hadn't been
paid by Essay Writers. Mr. Guevara explained to the officer that he had no
idea what the man was talking about.

So why, of all the addresses in the United
States, was Mr. Guevara's chosen? He's not sure, but he has a theory. Before
he bought the house, a woman named Olga Mizyuk lived there for a short time.
The previous owner, a friend of Mr. Guevara's, let her stay rent free
because she was down on her luck and she promised to teach him Russian. Mr.
Guevara believes it's all somehow connected to Ms. Mizyuk.

That theory is not too far-fetched. The
state of Virginia listed Olga Mizyuk as the agent of Universal Research LLC
when it was formed in 2006, though that registration has since lapsed (it's
now incorporated in Virginia with a different agent). The company was
registered for a time in Nevada, but that is no longer valid either. The
managing member of the Nevada company, according to state records, was Yuriy
Mizyuk. Mr. Guevara remembers that Ms. Mizyuk spoke of a son named Yuriy.
Could that all be a coincidence?

Hiring in Manila

Call any of the company's several phone
numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night.
The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or
Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will
reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will
be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.

If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will
direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always
either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls,
The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering
any questions.

But while the company's management may be
publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some
light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the
capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since
1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened
offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.

The company's customer-service center is
located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial
district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from
there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students.
The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and
computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves
making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on
the first page of Google results. (They're doing a good job, too. Recently
two of the first three hits for "buy an essay" were Essay Writers sites.)
One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior
search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page
that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link
builders.

Some of the company's writers work in its
Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers,
which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to
a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between
$1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction
of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently
advertising for more writers, praising itself as "one of the most trusted
professional writing companies in the industry."

It's difficult to know for sure who runs
Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr.
Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for
essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to
receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk
and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to
reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service
representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.

Installed in its Makati City offices,
according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on
employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing
the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same
source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as
a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. "He looks like
Harry Potter," the source says. "The worst kind of Harry Potter."

Writers for Hire

The writers for essay mills are anonymous
and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week,
hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to
$40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the
freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose.
Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

James Robbins is one of the good ones. Mr.
Robbins, now 30, started working for essay mills to help pay his way through
Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex. He continued after graduation and, for a
time, ran his own company under the name Mr. Essay. What he's discovered,
after writing hundreds of academic papers, is that he has a knack for the
form: He's fast, and his papers consistently earn high marks. "I can knock
out 10 pages in an hour," he says. "Ten pages is nothing."

His most recent gig was for Essay Writers.
His clients have included students from top colleges like the University of
Pennsylvania, and he's written short freshman-comp papers along with longer,
more sophisticated fare. Like all freelancers for Essay Writers, Mr. Robbins
logs in to a password-protected Web site that gives him access to the
company's orders. If he finds an assignment that's to his liking, he clicks
the "Take Order" button. "I took one on Christological topics in the second
and third centuries," he remembers. "I didn't even know what that meant. I
had to look it up on Wikipedia."

Most essay mills claim that they're only
providing "model" papers and that students don't really turn in what they
buy. Mr. Robbins, who has a law degree and now attends nursing school, knows
that's not true. In some cases, he says, customers have forgotten to put
their names at the top of the papers he's written before turning them in.
Although he takes pride in the writing he's done over the years, he doesn't
have much respect for the students who use the service. "These are kids
whose parents pay for college," he says. "I'll take their money. It's not
like they're going to learn anything anyway."

That's pretty much how Charles Parmenter
sees it. He wrote for Essay Writers and another company before quitting
about a year ago. "If anybody wants to say this is unethical — yeah, OK, but
I'm not losing any sleep over it," he says. Though he was, he notes, nervous
that his wife would react badly when she found out what he was doing. As it
happens, she didn't mind.

Mr. Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a
police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started
writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well.
He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of
English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of
his papers was too high. "People would come back to me and say, 'It's a
great paper, but my professor will never believe it's me,'" says Mr.
Parmenter. "I had to dumb them down."

Eventually the low pay forced him to quit.
In his best months, he brought home around $1,000. Other months it was half
that. He estimates that he wrote several hundred essays, all of which he's
kept, though most he can barely remember. "You write so many of these things
they start running together," he says.

Both Mr. Parmenter and Mr. Robbins live in
the United States. But the writers for essay mills are increasingly
international. Most of the users who log into the Essay Writers Web site are
based in India, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic.
A student in, say, Wisconsin usually has no idea that the paper he ordered
online is being written by someone in another country.

Like Nigeria. Paul Arhewe lives in Lagos,
that nation's largest city, and started writing for essay mills in 2005.
Back then he didn't have his own computer and had to do all of his research
and writing in Internet cafes. Now he works as an online editor for a
newspaper, but he still writes essays on the side. In the past three years,
he's written more than 200 papers for American and British students. In an
online chat, Mr. Arhewe insisted that the work he does is not unethical. "I
believe it is another way of learning for the smart and hardworking
students," he writes. Only lazy students, Mr. Arhewe says, turn in the
papers they purchase.

Mr. Arhewe started writing for Essay
Writers after another essay mill cheated him out of several hundred dollars.
That incident notwithstanding, he's generally happy with the work and
doesn't complain about the pay. He makes between $100 and $350 a month
writing essays — not exactly a fortune, but in a country like Nigeria, where
more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it's not
too bad either.

Mr. Arhewe, who has a master's degree from
the University of Lagos, has written research proposals and dissertations in
fields like marketing, economics, psychology, and political science. While
his English isn't quite perfect, it's passable, and apparently good enough
for his clients. Says Mr. Arhewe: "I am enjoying doing what I like and
getting paid for it."

Write My Dissertation

Some customers of Essay Writers are
college freshmen who, if their typo-laden, grammatically challenged order
forms are any indication, struggle with even the most basic writing tasks.
But along with the usual suspects, there is no shortage of seniors paying
for theses and graduate students buying dissertations.

One customer, for example, identifies
himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is
interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that
the dissertation must be "well-researched" and includes format requirements
and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of
Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT's Web site. The student also
suggests areas of emphasis like "static and dynamic stability of aircraft
controls."

The description is consistent with the
kind of research graduate students do, according to Barbara Lechner,
director of student services at the institute's department of aeronautics
and astronautics. In an initial interview, Ms. Lechner said she would bring
up the issue with others in the department. Several weeks later, Ms. Lechner
said she was told by higher-ups not to respond to The Chronicle's inquiries.

The head of the department, Ian A. Waitz,
says he doesn't believe it's possible, given the highly technical subject
matter, for a graduate student to pay someone else to research and write a
dissertation. "It seems like a bogus request," says Mr. Waitz, though he
wasn't sure why someone would fake such an order. However, like Ms. Lechner,
Mr. Waitz acknowledged that the topics in the request are consistent with
the department's graduate-level research.

Would-be aerospace engineers aren't the
only ones outsourcing their papers. A student at American University's law
school ordered a paper for a class called "The Law of Secrecy." She didn't
include her full name on the order, but she did identify one of her two
professors, Stephen I. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck — who immediately knew the
identity of the student from the description of the paper — was surprised
and disappointed because he tries to help students who are having trouble
and because he had talked to her about her paper. Mr. Vladeck argues that a
law school "has a particular obligation not to tolerate this kind of stuff."
The student never actually turned in the paper and took an "incomplete" for
the course.

Essay Writers attempts to hide the
identities of its customers even from the writers who do the actual work.
But it's not always successful. Some students inadvertently include personal
information when they upload files to the Web site; others simply put their
names at the bottom of their orders.

Jessica Dirr is a graduate student in
communication at Northern Kentucky University and an Essay Writers customer.
She hired the company to work on her paper "Separated at Birth: Symbolic
Boasting and the Greek Twin." Ms. Dirr says she looked online for assistance
because the university's writing center wasn't much help and because she had
trouble with citation rules. She describes what Essay Writers did as mostly
proofreading. "They made some suggestions, and I took their advice," she
says. Unfortunately, Ms. Dirr says, the paper "wasn't up to the level my
professor was hoping for."

Mickey Tomar paid Essay Writers $100 to
research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New
Testament class. Mr. Tomar, a senior at James Madison University majoring in
philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your
academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. "Like most
people in college, you don't have time to do research on some of these
things," he says. "I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality
writing."

Nicole Cohea paid $190 for a 10-page paper
on a Dove soap advertising campaign. Ms. Cohea, a senior communications
major at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote in her order that she
wanted the company to "add on to what I have already written." She helpfully
included an outline for the paper and wondered whether the writer could "add
a catchy quote at the beginning."

When asked whether it was wrong, in
general, to pay someone else to write your essay, Ms. Cohea responded,
"Definitely." But she says she wasn't planning to turn in the paper as her
own; instead, she says, she was only going to use it to get ideas. She was
not happy with the paper Essay Writers provided. It seemed, she says, to
have been written by a non-native English speaker. "I could tell they were
Asian or something just by the grammar and stuff," she says.

James F. Kollie writes a sporadically
updated blog titled My Ph.D. Journey in which he chronicles the progress
he's making toward his doctorate from Walden University. He recently ordered
the literature-review portion of his dissertation, "The Political Economy of
Privatization in Post-War Developing Countries," from Essay Writers. In the
order, he explains that the review should focus on privatization efforts
that have failed.

Mr. Kollie acknowledged in an interview
that he had placed an order with Essay Writers, but he said it was not
related to his dissertation. Rather, he says, it was part of a separate
research project he's conducting into online writing services. When asked if
his university was aware of the project, he replied, "I don't have time for
this," and hung up the phone.

Policing Plagiarism

Some institutions, most notably Boston
University, have made efforts to shut down essay mills and expose their
customers. A handful of states, including Virginia, have laws on the books
making it a misdemeanor to sell college essays. But those laws are rarely,
if ever, enforced. And even if a case were brought, it would be extremely
difficult to prosecute essay-mill operators living abroad.

So what's a professor to do? Thomas
Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in
England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a
colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow
writers to bid on students' projects. Their paper concludes that because
there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and
disciplining students is the exception.

In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found
that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while
some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they're doing.
"You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within
hours of it being released to them," he says. "Which has to mean that they
were intending to cheat from the beginning."

What he recommends, and what he does
himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or
project they've just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and
shrugged shoulders, there's a chance they haven't read, much less written,
their own paper.

Susan D. Blum suggests assigning papers
that can't easily be completed by others, like a personal reflection on that
day's lecture. Ms. Blum, an associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published book My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture, also encourages professors to keep in touch
with students as they complete major projects, though she concedes that can
be tough in a large lecture class.

But Ms. Blum points out a more fundamental
issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of
talking to students about what college is about and why studying — which may
seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential — actually
matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she
says. "We need to convey that to them."

Mr. Tomar, the philosophy-and-religion
major who bought a paper for his New Testament class, still doesn't think
students should have to do their own research. But he has soured on essay
mills after the paper he received from Essay Writers did not meet his
expectations. He complained, and the company gave him a 30-percent refund.
As a result, he had an epiphany of sorts. Says Mr. Tomar: "I was like — you
know what? — I'm going to write this paper on my own."

A new study contradicts the perception that
cheating is more widespread in online classes, finding that students in
virtual courses were less likely to cheat than their face-to-face peers.

You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results, since the
study only looked at 225 students at Friends University, a private,
mid-sized, Christian-based institution in Wichita, Kansas.

For the new study, researchers surveyed undergraduate
students about seven types of academic misconduct. These included cheating
on tests, plagiarism, and aiding and abetting (letting a classmate copy a
paper, for example). In both traditional and online classes, aiding and
abetting was found to be the cheating method of choice.

Asked about the results, Donna Stuber-McEwen, an author of the study,
suggested that age may be one factor.

“Research has show that older students tend to cheat less frequently than
younger students,” said Stuber-McEwen, a psychology professor, told The
Chronicle. “And our sample tended to have a greater percentage of
nontraditional students in the online classes.”

"Cambridge Survey
Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized,"
by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3,
2008 ---
Click Here

Half the students at the University of Cambridge
have plagiarized, according to results of a survey byVarsity,a student newspaper at the university.

The newspaper said its survey had attracted 1,014
respondents, of whom 49 percent said they had committed at least one act
defined by the university as plagiarism. The list of forbidden acts
included: handing in someone else’s essay; copying and pasting from the
Internet; copying or making up statistics, code, or research results;
handing in work that had been submitted previously; using someone else’s
ideas without acknowledgment; buying an essay; and having an essay edited byOxbridge Essays,a company that provides online essay services. Five
percent of those who admitted having plagiarized said they had been caught.

Some students were surprised to find that what they
thought were innocuous academic acts had landed them in the plagiarist
category. “Of course I use other people’s ideas without acknowledging them,
but I didn’t think that this made me a plagiarist,” one student said.

But others admitted copying or buying work “when I
am late with an essay or finding it difficult.” Law students, the newspaper
said, broke the rules most often, with 62 percent admitting that they had
plagiarized. Four percent of students surveyed said they had written for
Oxbridge Essays.

Comments

Yes, and 100% of civil rights leaders named Martin
Luther King, Jr., have also plagiarized. And 100% of writers named Doris
Kearns Goodwin have plagiarized. And 100% of vice-presidential candidates
named Joe Biden have plagiarized. These students are in good company. Maybe
we should educate them rather than haul them before a firing squad, as too
many professors want to do.

— gl Nov 1, 08:22 PM #

I agree with gl, it seems a bit harsh to haul
anyone anywhere, much less before a firing squad, until we have delved into
the depth of the training students receive about the rigors of attribution.
(Hint: scandalously little)

The internet with all its advances did bomb us back
to the intellectual property stone age with the conspicuous absence of paper
trails for the materials one can find within a click or two of beginning
research.

The other part of the problem, and I am ready to be
placed before the firing squad for this comment, professors (especially at
the undergraduate level) do not put enough thinking into the construction of
their essay questions. And to make matters worse, they use the same old
tired questions year in decade out. So let’s look at our role in
perpetuating this obnoxious problem and criminal waste of time on both
sides.

Newsflash, profs! Life is short. Why spend your
precious discretionary time playing cops and robbers with your students?

— BC PROF Nov 1, 11:42 PM #

Using a service like Turnitin.com helps to reduce
plagiarism quite a bit because even if the students don’t have a high
likelihood of getting caught, they know that they are really taking a big
risk if they try to fool the system. If students know there’s a good chance
they’ll get caught, they will not engage in plagiarism. Some professors
would rather spend their leisure time with their families or doing their own
research rather than chasing down sources of plagiarism. Use the tools to
help you catch cheaters so you can have more time for your own life.

— MEH Nov 2, 02:16 PM #

Of course if I discover that a student has
committed plagiarism, I take the steps that are prescribed by the honor code
at my university. But I did not become a teacher to spend my time enforcing
such codes. If a student cheats and receives a grade that he doesn’t
deserve, he is the poorer for it. We have this idea that cheaters are
robbing someone else of something valuable, and therefore that we ought to
act to stop them or to punish them. It is not so difficult to see that
plagiarists are only cheating themselves. They pay the very high price of
not learning what they might have learned under their own lights, and to my
mind that is penalty enough.

— SK Nov 2, 02:49 PM #

MEH, the time you save with turnitin.com is lost
when you catch a cheater, because you yourself become a cheater if you don’t
report the honor violation (rather than handle it privately, which most
campuses frown upon). So assuming you’re as honest as you expect your
student to be, you’re sucked into the whole lengthy honors process, with
forms and hearings and meetings and eventually the wish that you had not
been so persnickety.

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written. Or, as I do, require first drafts of nearly
completed works, a couple weeks before the real due date, with which you can
issue warnings framed in face-saving
look-what-you-forgot-you-cite-or-enclose-in-quotation-marks language. They
get the message you’re tough, especially if you threaten reporting an honors
violation if the supposed error is not corrected, and you spend even more
time with your own life.

— gl Nov 2, 03:04 PM #

gl

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written.

right, I am sure that is feasible in history of
philosophy classes. Second Idea was much more reasonable.

— jon Nov 2, 08:54 PM #

The key is what the students perceive as cheating.
If using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it is cheating, then we
are all cheaters. The kids come in to college 17 years old and dumb. They
sit in lectures, read books, talk to classmates and faculty, and hear all
kinds of new ideas. How can they ever acknowledge where all those ideas came
from? How can they even remember when the ideas were first planted and by
whom?

Similarly, good writing involves sharing ideas with
other students, revising and proofreading. That violates the honor code
standard of “doing your own work.” We create a catch-22 when we demand high
quality work but strictly prohibit some of the methods that are essential
for good learning. And even if we don’t “strictly” prohibit appropriate
collaboration, not all students know where the line is. Consequently, some
students will identify themselves as cheaters, even though the type of help
they get on their assignments is acceptable.

And in my field, it is pretty common for students
to forget to write down some detail of their source information, and at the
last minute have to fudge the works cited. Technically it is fabrication,
and the students know it. It would be embarrassing to publish a error-filled
works cited. But in the end it is too trivial to worry about.

All these kinds of cases drive up the number of
self-identified cheaters. It isn’t worth faculty worrying out.

— Shar Nov 3, 12:33 AM #

As others have noted, the extensive use of
plagiarism requires an educational solution. I commend to you an excellent
article by Eleanour Snow who describes (and links to) a number of
institution-wide web tutorials designed to teach students about plagiarism.
You can view the article at http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=306&action=article
(requires free subscription).

Rumors abound in Russia that many top leaders have
degrees that they didn't really earn, but some officials are starting to
tackle the issue of plagiarism.
Timereported that the deputy minister of
education and science reviewed 25 dissertations at random from the history
department at Moscow Pedagogical State University. With one exception, all
were found to be extensively plagiarized, with some having as much as 90
percent of the material copied.

It's not clear that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesisLarge parts of an economics thesis written by President
Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management
textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday,
citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however,
whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to
impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the
mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations
at the time.
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 ---
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html

Jensen Comment
What's interesting about this news item is that it was published in Moscow. This
would not have happened in the old Soviet Union

Joe Biden --- Beyond Plagiarism
If only Vice President Joe Biden had stuck to plagiarism. But he apparently
hasn’t learned. In 1987, he copied and used a large chunk of a speech given by
British labor leader Neil Kinnock, even though some of the facts (related to
family history) didn’t match his own. Since then, he’s gone from plagiarism to
smashmouth rhetorician. Last week, Biden was called out by former Bush advisor
Karl Rove because Biden repeatedly said he’d chastised President Bush in person.
And Biden came out of the ensuing discussion with a lot of mud on his face. On
April 6, 2009, Biden said: “I remember President Bush saying to me one time in
the Oval Office, 'Well, Joe, I'm a leader.' And I said: 'Mr. President, turn and
around look behind you. No one is following.’” Three days later, on April 9,
Rove said Biden’s conversation with Bush did not happen. Candida P. Wolff,
Bush’s White House liaison, concurred: “I don't ever remember Biden being in the
Oval. He was such a blowhard on all that stuff -- there wasn't a reason to bring
him in." Facts notwithstanding, Biden has been telling stories that make it
sound like he had unfettered access to Bush for some time. On HBO’s “Real Time
with Bill Maher” in April 2006, Biden said: “The president will say things to
me, and I'll literally turn to the president, say: 'Mr. President, how can you
say that, knowing you don't know the facts?' And he'll look at me and…say: 'My
instincts. …I have good instincts.' [To which I’ll say]: 'Mr. President, your
instincts aren't good enough.'"A.W.R. Hawkins, Human Events,
April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=31447

Having taught accounting at Cambridge for several
years, I believe that these high plagiarism figures are of no relevance to
any accounting courses taught there.

I would guess that the high figures are likely due
to the unique college tutorial system at Cambridge University (along with
Oxford and a few others) where undergraduate students attend frequent
(usually biweekly) small group tutorials in addition to lectures. Students
are often required to write essays for these tutorials under very tight time
constraints. The high plagiarism figures are likely driven by undergraduates
trying to finish essays by these deadlines. The students don't benefit from
such cheating. Although the essays are marked they do not count towards a
final grade, and any under-prepared students are usually exposed as such in
the tutorials. [For accounting tutorials, essays are very rarely set, and
instead students are required to work through a previously unseen question.]

Paul Guest
Cranfield School of Management

Then in a second message Paul wrote the following:

I agree, cheating students won't learn much about
the assigned material if they cheat. However, under the Cambridge and Oxford
(tutorial & written assignment) system (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system , cheating
students are much more likely to be caught at an early stage when the
consequences are much less severe (since written assignments do not
contribute to final grades). The cheating can therefore be dealt with
informally and with a light touch by a tutor who is close to the student, so
lessons can be learned with no lasting damage. Especially important when
many cases of plagiarism appear to arise from ignorance.

Also, assignment writing for tutorials at Cambridge
is optional. Undergraduate students can choose not to produce written
assignments for tutorials (or simply not turn up to them). However, by not
participating they are foregoing the most important learning experience at
Cambridge. The tutorial and written assignment system is the fundamental
pedagogic difference between Cambridge and other universities and a key
reason why Cambridge has been so successful. It is worth £2000 per year for
each undergraduate student (previously paid by the government but not any
longer as of this year
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/oct/14/highereducation.universityfunding
). Students are very aware of this and very rarely
miss supervisions or fail to submit written assignments.

From my experience in teaching these supervisions
(I also taught economics and finance for which essays were assigned) I dont
believe that plagiarism is rampant. Instead I interpret the high figures
along the lines suggested by Dave Albrecht, that although 49% of students
have plagiarised at some point, each student has done it very rarely.

By the way, a huge thankyou from across the pond to
you and the other contributors to this list, and for the great material on
your website.

"Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions
derived from others."

When
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism after the publication of her
autobiography,
The Story of My Life (public
library), Mark Twain sent her
a note of solidarity and support, assuring her that "substantially
all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a
million outside sources." Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham
Bell – father of the telephone – wrote Annie Sullivan, Keller's
teacher, a
letter with a similar sentiment. Bell argued that it is "difficult
for us to trace the origin of our expressions" and "we are all of
us … unconscious plagiarists, especially in childhood" – a notion
neurologist Oliver Sacks has affirmed more than a century later with his
recent insights on
memory and plagiarism, and one the poet Kenneth Goldsmith has
institutionalized with his
class on "uncreative writing."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think in the case of students, most plagiarism investigations center around
verbatim or nearly-verbatim passages without attribution. Sometimes, as in the
case of dissertation research, focus may be placed upon suspected and non-cited
earlier ideas and possibly mathematical proofs that are sometimes relatively
easy to reformulate in slightly different ways.

The non-cited verbatim plagiarisms of other writers and composers of course
are much more difficult to justify on ethical or legal grounds. So are the
reformulated plagiarisms of ideas, although these are much more difficult to
detect and prosecute in court.

Students can spend anything as little as a few
hours up to a few weeks for an average, normal essay part of their
undergraduate studies. Some will have more essays than others, but they’re
an important part of a qualification.
They show how the learner understands the knowledge they have acquired,how to reference and cite sources, as well as a
discipline in writing formats. It’s an art, rather than a chore; maybe
that’s why so many Bachelor of Arts degree qualifications have essays - art
and arts.

But the other day, I received an email from
CheatHouse.com, a website which “specialises in essays and papers for
students”. They offer a variety of ways to plug into the database, but the
primary way is to pay for access, allowing you to read through and access
thousands of pre-written essays and dissertations.From
their about page:

“To stimulate learning. Simply. We have gotten
a lot of critisism in the past, and I suspect this will continue in the
future, but we are trying to build a community, where students come
together.”

Considering the name of the damn website is “CheatHouse”,
are we supposed to fall for that? Now let’s face it; the chances of somebody
buying a unique essay to study it and not to plagiarise it, is
little-to-none. As a society, we are unfortunately not that moral.

It does, however, try to justify it on a specific
page buried within the mass of links, and dodging the “encouraging cheating”
question with another question; whilst creating a loophole to wiggle out of
the plagiarism question. Just because the person who wrote the essay cites
all the sources, references and acknowledges authors, doesn’t mean someone
else can hand it in as theirs. It just doesn’t work like that. A dictionary
definition won’t detract away from what appears to be a standard policy of a
university.

“So you didn’t write this essay?” … “No, but
all the sources are cited and it’s referenced.” … “Oh that’s OK then,
well done, you’ve got a first.”

Idiots.

Why pick out this website? Because not only do they
offer a slice of temptation cake to students, they also send out spam emails
to Hotmail addresses. I just wish I hadn’t deleted the email in the first
place. It’s not just them though; there are so many “services” out there
which promote and actively support this.

Considering that a degree, or a masters or
doctorate qualification enables a person to go on to very specific,
specialised practices, I cannot see how the people who buy and use these
essays should be let through to graduate. They surely wouldn’t, except they
aren’t detected. The websites that provide these, especially this particular
website which spam’s people as well, should be absolutely ashamed of
themselves.

Putting it simply, it’s cheating a way into a
qualification, which could be used to gain a job position or academic
status. That, my friends, is fraud.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Plagiarism is generally thought of as being a literal or nearly-literal stealing
of parts of the writings of others. It can, however, also entail the stealing of
ideas without citation as to where those ideas were borrowed from in the
literature or other media. It is especially relevant in this era of Weblogs,
blogs, and YouTube where many ideas are stated that do not necessarily appear in
traditional printed versions such as journals and books.

Jensen Comment
Plagiarism is generally thought of as being a literal or nearly-literal stealing
of parts of the writings of others. It can, however, also entail the stealing of
ideas without citation as to where those ideas were borrowed from in the
literature or other media. It is especially relevant in this era of Weblogs,
blogs, and YouTube where many ideas are stated that do not necessarily appear in
traditional printed versions such as journals and books.

How to play tricks on fair value accounting by "managing" the closing
price of key securities in the portfolio
Painting the Tape (also called Banging the Close) This occurs when a portfolio manager holding a
security buys a few additional shares right at the close of business at an
inflated price. For example, if he held shares in XYZ Corp on the last day
of the reporting period (and it's selling at, say $50), he might put in
small orders at a higher price to inflate the the closing price (which is
what's reported). Do this for a couple dozen stocks in the portfolio, and
the reported performance goes up. Of course, it goes back down the next day,
but it looks good on the annual report.
Jason Zweig, "Pay Attention to That Window Behind the Curtain," The Wall
Street Journal, December 20, 2008 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122973369481523187.html?

The above module has great potential for dissertation study. A doctoral
student who does so, however, and fails to cite Jason Zweig for the idea is in
fact cheating even if not a single phrase is lifted from Zweig's article.

The problem with this non-literal text phrasing is that plagiarism search
engines often cannot detect the plagiarism of ideas.

Question
Have you considered asking your students to turn in two term papers
simultaneously, one of which is mostly plagiarized and one that is pledged
to be not plagiarized in any way with proper citations?

That’s what Kate Hagopian, an instructor in the
first-year writing program at North Carolina State University, does. For one
assignment, she gives her students a short writing passage and then a prompt
for a standard student short essay. She asks her students to turn in two
versions. In one they are told that they must plagiarize. In the second,
they are told not to. The prior night, the students were given an online
tutorial on plagiarism and Hagopian said she has become skeptical that
having the students “parrot back what we’ve told them” accomplishes
anything. Her hope is that this unusual assignment might change that.

After the students turn in their two responses to
the essay prompt, Hagopian shares some with the class. Not surprisingly, the
students do know how to plagiarize — but were uncomfortable admitting as
much. Hagopian said that the assignment is always greeted with
“uncomfortable laughter” as the students must pretend that they never would
have thought of plagiarizing on their own. Given the right to do so, they
turn in essays with many direct quotes without attribution. Of course in
their essays that are supposed to be done without plagiarism, she still
finds problems — not so much with passages repeated verbatim, but with
paraphrasing or using syntax in ways that were so similar to the original
that they required attribution.

When she started giving the assignment, she sort of
hoped, Hagopian said, to see students turn in “nuanced tricky
demonstrations” of plagiarism, but she mostly gets garden variety copying.
But what she is doing is having detailed conversations with her students
about what is and isn’t plagiarism — and by turning everyone into a
plagiarist (at least temporarily), she makes the conversation something that
can take place openly.

“Students know I am listening,” she said. And by
having the conversation in this way — as opposed to reading the riot act —
she said she is demonstrating that all plagiarism is not the same, whether
in technique, motivation or level of sophistication. There is a difference
between “deliberate fraud” and “failed apprenticeship,” she said.

Hagopian’s approach was among many described at
various sessions last week at theannual meeting of the Conference of College
Composition andCommunication,in New Orleans. Writing instructors — especially those
tasked with teaching freshmen — are very much on the front lines of the war
against plagiarism. As much as other faculty members, they resent plagiarism
by their students — and in fact several of the talks featured frank
discussion of how betrayed writing instructors feel when someone turns in
plagiarized work.

That anger does motivate some to use the software
that detects plagiarism as part of an effort to scare students and weed out
plagiarists, and there was some discussion along those lines. But by and
large, the instructors at the meeting said that they didn’t have any
confidence that these services were attacking the roots of the problem or
finding all of the plagiarism. Several people quipped that if the software
really detected all plagiarism, plenty of campuses would be unable to hold
classes, what with all of the sessions needed for academic integrity boards.

While there was a group therapy element to some of
the discussions, there was also a strong focus on trying new solutions.
Freshmen writing instructors after all don’t have the option available to
other faculty members of just blaming the problem on the failures of those
who teach first-year comp.

Like Hagopian, many of those at the meeting said
that they are focused on trying to better understand their students, what
makes them plagiarize, and what might make them better understand academic
integrity. There wasn’t much talk of magic bullets, but lots of ideas about
ways to better see the issue from a student perspective — and to find ways
to use that perspective to promote integrity.

Having grown weary of punishing students for
plagiarizing and advising other professors to fail them, too, Meg Files said
that she had an epiphany during a random chat with a colleague at Pima
Community College’s West Campus. The professor explained that he had
recently gone to traffic school after receiving a ticket and that the course
had actually improved his driving.

“So I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a parallel
program for plagiarism?’ ” said Files, who chairs Pima’s English/journalism
department.

Seizing on the idea, Files created a “traffic
school for plagiarism,” aimed at altering the campus’s focus on catching and
punishing students for turning in essays they didn’t write. Now students can
seek academic rehabilitation instead of punishment by participating in a
plagiarism program that contains five steps:

Write a detailed, self-exam on “Why I
plagiarized.”

Read case studies of plagiarism. (Files said
that many of the examples cover cases of professional journalists fired
from their jobs.)

Write a paragraph defining plagiarism.

Meet with a tutor to discuss proper citation
etiquette and complete a short worksheet on citations.

Meet with a faculty committee to talk about
how to avoid plagiarism and lessons learned.

Files, who will be overseeing the program, said
that it is too early to tell whether it will be successful. Only a few
students have elected to sign up, and none have yet finished.

“My reaction is, good for them,” said Donald L.
McCabe, founding president of the
Center for Academic Integrity. McCabe, a professor
of management and global business at Rutgers University, called Pima’s
approach a good policy that cuts down the middle between two extremes:
excessively punishing students for literary piracy, or ignoring them. McCabe
said that his own research finds that plagiarism is slightly more common
today than in previous decades and that honor codes help curb the problem.

However, current policies at most educational
institution revolve around detection and punishment. A number of
universities now use online products such as Turnitin.comto scan essays for stolen text.

While catching students and then failing them for
copying does help to reduce plagiarism, McCabe said that it probably doesn’t
provide the best results and may just teach students to be more careful when
they cheat. “Now we are just teaching students how to avoid detection,” he
said.

Instructing students how to correctly reference
other work and instilling a sense of academic integrity in them is
difficult, McCabe said, but is the best way to dissuade students from
plagiarizing.

“I like the focus — the remedial aspect instead of
just playing gotcha,” said John P. Lesko, editor ofthe new scholarly
journal,Plagiary. Lesko pointed out that some
students may not even know that plagiarism is a bad thing, and that copying
is considered normal in some countries.

He noted that Carolyn Matalene, now professor
emeritus of English language and literature at the University of South
Carolina, noticed in the 1980s that
students in Chinaregularly pilfered lines from
published pieces. “She found that copying was actually encouraged so that
you would learn like the masters,” he said.

Files said that cultural differences in defining
plagiarism also drove her develop the new program. “In some cultures,
plagiarism isn’t bad,” she said. But she also found that the current
policies at her institution were not going far enough. In the past, Pima
tried to curb plagiarism by assigning original topics, which makes it more
difficult for students to purchase an essay, and by emphasizing the writing
process—outlining, drafting, revising—over delivering a finished product.
Finally, faculty have been encouraging students to be confident and proud of
their own writing. She calls these steps “prevention” and the new program a
“cure” once plagiarism is found.

“I think it’s a worthwhile effort, but the
motivation to plagiarize is huge,” said Colin Purrington, associate
professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College. Purrington became
so concerned about the growing problem with plagiarism that he put up a
complete Web siteto address the issue a couple of
years ago.

One of the resources he cites as a deterrent
against plagiarism is an
essay that a Swarthmore student wroteas a
disciplinary measure after getting caught. The essay reads: “Plagiarism is
undisputedly, a most egregious academic offense. Unfortunately, I found that
out the hard way. I cannot even begin to describe how unpleasant the
experience was for me.”

On his Web page, Purrington notes that the essay is
nicely written and urges instructors to hand it out to students to generate
discussion. But he also notes with some chagrin: “That person got caught
again some years later.”

Question
who were at least two famous world leaders who plagiarized doctoral theses?

The
source Putin plagiarized is a well known textbook. Perhaps by translating it
into Russian he or his helpers thought it would not be detected.

Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized US textbook
Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized sections of
an American management textbook in writing an economics dissertation a decade
ago, The Washington Times newspaper reported. Putin, who wrote a 218-page paper
on planning in the natural resources sector, reportedly lifted numerous passages
directly from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh
academics, the Times said late on Saturday, citing research by two scholars at
the respected Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. Putin, who
obtained a doctorate degree in economics in 1997 from the St. Petersburg Mining
Institute wrote his thesis on "The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources
Under the Formation of Market Relations." After reviewing the document,
Brookings researchers Clifford Gaddy and Igor Danchenko concluded that large
sections of Putin’s dissertation were copied almost word-for-word from the 1978
management text "Strategic Planning and Policy," by University of Pittsburgh
professors William King and David Cleland.
http://theunjustmedia.com/Unjustmedia%20Archive/March%202006/march%2027%202006.htm

Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was UnintentionalKaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused
of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel,
acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's
books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious." The book,
"How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," was recently published
by Little, Brown to wide publicity. On Sunday, The Harvard Crimson reported
that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a deal for "Opal" and
one other book, had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan
McCafferty, an author of popular young-adult books.
Dinitia Smith, "Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional," The New
York Times, April 25, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Her Publisher is Not ConvincedA day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts
of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,"
from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from
called her apology "troubling and disingenuous." On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan, in
an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts"
and "Second Helpings," both young adult novels published by Crown, a division of
Random House, had been "unintentional and unconscious." But in a statement
issued today, Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and
character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of
youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act." He said that there
were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book "that contain identical
language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first
two books."
Dinitia Smith, Publisher Rejects Young Novelist's Apology," The New York
Times, April 26, 2006 ---
Click Here

Unlike the purchase/pooling debate or derivatives,
this one is something I know a fair bit about!

First, Harvard does not have an honor code, though
they debated one in the 1980s. Nor does Harvard belong to the Center for
Academic Integrity, despite the fact that most of the other Ivy Leagues, all
the seven sisters except Radcliffe, and over 390 universities (including a
few in Canada and Australia) do. That being said, the Harvard BUSINESS
School does have a code, voted in overwhelmingly by its own students several
years ago.

There is a tremendous variety in scope of honor
codes. Some address only academic issues while others have broader coverage.
I remember my senior year at Smith two fellow seniors were expelled during
their final semester for putting sugar in the gas tank of another student.
This was adjudicated under the honor code there. However other campuses
would handle such a thing through their students affairs or residence life
departments (or of course the police could be called in).

For those unfamiliar with honor codes, Melendez,
McCabe & Trevino, and my papers have used these criteria for an honor code:

1. unproctored exams
2. some kind of signed pledge that students will not cheat
3. a peer judiciary
4. reportage requirements, i.e., students should not tolerate violations
of academic integrity and have an obligation to report them

Any one or a combination of these criteria must be
in place for a true honor code. McCabe's research has shown that honor codes
cut cheating about in half.

The clearing house, if you will, for honor codes in
place in the U.S. is the Center for Academic Integrity, at
www.academicintegrity.org

Now back to Bob's question, pretending it took
place at a university with an honor code. Did this plagiarism take place in
the context of coursework? I believe the answer in this case is no.
Therefore it would depend on whether the honor code was written to encompass
activities outside of class. Some codes would capture this incident under
the general category of behavior that brings disrepute to the university
(all sorts of things, including well-known athletes that behave in a drunken
manner in public, debate teams that trash a hotel room, you name it). Others
would have no jurisdiction in this case because it did not take place in
class, nor did she do it as part of an organized university group or
function.

Honor codes are a wonderful thing if students are
socialized into accepting them early. They can really make cheating a major
social gaffe, such that many students who might cheat elsewhere wouldn't
take the risk. Perhaps this woman would not have committed this plagiarism
if she had been at a university with an honor code culture. I still remember
how unnerved I was (and perhaps how naive) when I was first a teaching
assistant at LSU. I couldn't believe all the precautions, including leaving
bags at the front, removing hats, spacing people apart, requiring photo
identification on their desks, pacing the rows, etc. I had never even been
proctored during an exam before, so it was really a culture shock!

I could go on and on, as this is a favorite topic
of mine, but I'll save more for another day. :-)

In January the University of Michigan Scholarly
Publishing Office launched a refereed online journal, PLAGIARY. The purpose
of the journal is "to bring together the various strands of scholarship
which already exist on the subject, and to create a forum for discussion
across disciplinary boundaries." Papers in the first issues include:

-- "The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the
Story"

-- "Copy This! A Historical Perspective On the Use
of the Photocopier in Art"

-- "A Million Little Pieces of Shame"

Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism,
Fabrication, and Falsification [ISSN 1559-3096] is available free of charge
as an Open Access journal on the Internet athttp://www.plagiary.org/
. For more information contact: John P. Lesko, Editor,
Department of English, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center,
MI 48710 USA; tel: 989-964-2067; fax: 989-790-7638; email:jplesko@svsu.edu

This article reports the results of a trial of
automated detection of term-paper plagiarism in a large, introductory
undergraduate class. The trial was premised on the observation that college
students exploit information technology extensively to cheat on papers and
assignments, but for the most part university faculty have employed few
technological techniques to detect cheating. Topics covered include the
decision to adopt electronic means for screening student papers, strategic
concerns regarding deterrence versus detection of cheating, the technology
employed to detect plagiarism, student outcomes, and the results of a survey
of student attitudes about the experience. The article advances the thesis
that easily-adopted techniques not only close a sophistication gap associated
with computerized cheating, but can place faculty in a stronger position than
they have ever enjoyed historically with regard to the deterrence and
detection of some classes of plagiarism.

But the topic of plagiarism itself
keeps returning. One professor after another gets caught in
the act. The journalists and popular writers are just as
prolific with other people’s words. And as for the topic of
student plagiarism, forget it — who has time to keep up?

It was not that surprising, last fall,
to come across the call for papers for a new scholarly
journal called Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in
Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. I made a
mental note to check its Web site
again — and see that it began publishing this month.

One study is already available at
the site: an analysis of how the federal Office of Research
Integrity handled 19 cases of plagiarism involving research
supported by the U.S. Public Health Service. Another paper,
scheduled for publication shortly, will review media
coverage of the Google Library Project. Several other
articles are now working their way through peer review,
according to the journal’s founder, John P. Lesko, an
assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State
University, and will be published throughout the year in
open-source form. There will also be an annual print edition
of Plagiary. The entire project has the support of
the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of
Michigan.

In a telephone interview, Lesko
told me that research into plagiarism is central to his own
scholarship. His dissertation, titled “The Dynamics of
Derivative Writing,” was accepted by the University of
Edinburgh in 2000 — extracts from which appear at his Web
site
Famous Plagiarists,which he says
now gets between 5,000 and 6,000 visitors per month.

While the journal Plagiary
has a link to Famous Plagiarists, and vice versa, Lesko
insists that they are separate entities — the former
scholarly and professional, the latter his personal project.
And that distinction is a good thing, too. Famous
Plagiarists tends to hit a note of stridency such that, when
Lesko quotes Camille Paglia denouncing the
poststructuralists as “cunning hypocrites whose tortured
syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral
culpability of their and their parents’ generations in Nazi
France,” she seems almost calm and even-tempered by
contrast.

“It seems that both Foucault and
Barthes’ contempt for the Author was expressed in some
rather plagiaristic utterances,” he writes, “a parroting of
the Nietschean ‘God is dead’ assertion.” That might strike
some people as confusing allusion with theft. But Lesko is
vehement about how the theorists have served as enablers for
the plagiarists, as well as the receivers of hot cargo.

“After all,” he writes, “a
plagiarist — so often with the help of collaborators and
sympathizers — steals the very livelihood of a text’s real
author, thus relegating that author to obscurity for as long
as the plagiarist’s name usurps a text, rather than the
author being recognized as the text’s originator. Plagiarism
of an author condemns that author to death as a text’s
rightfully acknowledged creator...” (The claim that Barthes
and Foucault were involved in diminishing the reputation of
Nietzsche has not, I believe, ever been made before.)

To a degree, his frustration
is understandable. In some quarters, it is common to recite
– as though it were an established truth, rather than an
extrapolation from one of Foucault’s essays – the idea that
plagiarism is a “historically constructed” category of
fairly recent vintage: something that came into being around
the 18th century, when a capitalistically organized
publishing industry found it necessary to foster the concept
of literary property.

A very interesting argument to be
sure — though not one that holds up under much scrutiny.

The term “plagiarism” in its
current sense is about two thousand years old. It was coined
by the Roman poet Martial, who complained that a rival was
biting his dope rhymes. (I translate freely.) Until he
applied the word in that context, plagiarius had
meant someone who kidnapped slaves. Clearly some notion of
literary property was already implicit in Martial’s figure
of speech, which dates to the first century A.D.

At around the same time, Jewish
scholars were putting together the text of that gigantic
colloquium known as the Talmud, which contains a passage
exhorting readers to be scrupulous about attributing their
sources. (And in keeping with that principle, let me
acknowledge pilfering from the erudition of Stuart P. Green,
a professor of law at Louisiana State University at Baton
Rouge, whose fascinating paper “Plagiarism, Norms, and the
Limits of Theft Law: Some Observations on the Use of
Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property
Rights” appeared in the Hastings Law Review in 2002.)

In other words, notions of
plagiarism and of authorial integrity are very much older
than, say, the Romantic cult of the absolute originality of
the creative genius. (You know — that idea Coleridge ripped
off from Kant.)

At the same time, scholarship on
plagiarism should probably consist of something more than
making strong cases against perpetrators of intellectual
thievery. That has its place, of course. But how do you
understand it when artists and writers make plagiarism a
deliberate and unambiguous policy? I’m thinking of
Kathy Acker’s novels,for example.
Or the essayist and movie maker Guy Debord’s proclamation in
the 1960s: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.”
(Which he, in turn, had copied from the avant-garde writer
Lautreamont, who had died almost a century earlier.)

Why, given the potential for
humiliation, do plagiarists run the risk? Are people doing
it more, now? Or is it, rather, now just a matter of more
people getting caught?

Given Lesko’s evident passion
on the topic of plagiarism as a moral transgression –
embodied most strikingly, perhaps, in his color-coded
War on Plagiarism Threat Level Analysis– I had to wonder if the doors of [ital]Plagiary[ital]
would be open to scholars not sharing his perspective.

Was it worth the while of, say, a
Foucauldian to offer him a paper?

“It may be that I’m a bit more
conservative than some scholars,” he conceded. But he points
out that manuscripts submitted to Plagiary undergo a
double-blind review process. They are examined by three
reviewers – most of them, but not all, from the journal’s
editorial board.

There is no ideological or
theoretical litmus test, and he’s actively seeking
contributions from people you might not expect. “I’m willing
to consider articles from plagiarists,” he said.

That’s certainly throwing the door
wide open. You would probably want to vet their work pretty
carefully, though.

Cheating then versus nowWhat this means in evaluative practice is not only that
the opportunities to cheat (just to continue to use this word) are enormously
expanded. The nature of cheating itself changes accordingly — to the despair of
every teacher, beginning with those who teach freshman composition. The very
fact that “plagiarism” must be carefully defined there defers to the absence of
what the dean in (the movie) School Ties
refers to as a vacuum. (Could cheating even be punished — in his terms — if one
has to begin by defining it?) It also testifies to the near-impossibility of
judging a paper on SUV’s or gay marriage or God-knows-what that has been cobbled
together out of Internet sources whose fugitive presence, sentence by sentence,
is almost undetectable. Furthermore, to the student these sources may well be
almost unremarkable, with respect to his or her own words. What is this business
of one’s “own words” anyway? What if the very notion has been formed by CNN? How
not to visit its site (say) when time comes to write? Most students will be
unfamiliar with a theoretical orientation that questions the whole idea of
originality. But they will not be unaffected with some consequences, no less
than they are unaffected by, say, the phenomenon of sampling and remixing as it
takes place in popular culture, especially fashion or music. “Plagiarism”
has to contend with all sorts of notions of imitation, none of which possess any
moral valence. Therefore, plagiarism becomes — first, if not foremost — a matter
of interpretive judgment. Cheating, on the other hand, is not interpretive in
the same way (and, in the world of (the movie) School Ties, not “interpretive” at all). No wonder, in a sense, that test
gradually has had to yield to text. It is almost as if the vacuum could not
hold. By the present time, the importance of determining grades (in part if not
whole) by means of papers acquires the character of a sort of revenge of popular
culture — ranging from cable television to rap music — upon academic culture.
Terry Caesar, "Cheating in a Time of Extenuating Circumstances," Inside
Higher Ed, July 8, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/08/caesar

Jensen Comment: The 1992 movie School Ties focuses on cheating
brought to light by an honor code that requires students to report seeing other
students cheat. It also focuses on education at a time when cheating was
more severely punished, usually by expulsion from school. In most colleges
today, first-time offenders who get caught are generally placed on some type of
probation. At the same time most schools have modified their honor codes
in this litigious society such that students are no longer required to report
observed cheating of other students. Many instructors view reporting of
cheating as becoming too much of a hassle in terms of time and trouble when the
student will not be severely punished in any case. This leads to greater
risk taking on the part of some students when it comes to cheating. They
are less likely to be detected and, if detected for the first time, the
punishments are negligible relative to the rewards. Such risk taking
continues on when they are tempted to cheat as executives in business/government
and the temptations to siphon off millions of dollars are great.

From T.H.E.
Newsletter on November 17, 2004

With the crunch of midterms, finding time to write
that history paper or analyze that Shakespeare poem may seem like an
impossible feat.

But students will want to think twice before running
to the Internet to download a paper in times of desperation, as UCLA renewed
its license this year for the commonly used online anti-plagiarism service,
Turnitin.com…

Ministers should learn that it is much more acceptable if attribution of
source material is given up frontGlenn Wagner was a successful mega-church pastor in
Charlotte, N.C., until one of his elders heard a sermon on the radio that was
identical to one he had heard from the pulpit. Mr. Wagner confessed that he had
been preaching other people's sermons off and on for two years, including some
he broadcast on Christian radio. He resigned from his ministry last fall. A
similar case occurred after members of the National City Christian Church in
Washington, D.C., found on the internet sermons that Alvin O'Neal, moderator of
the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a celebrated preacher in that
denomination, had preached. Mr. O'Neal apologized for his actions and remains in
his ministry. A number of lesser-known ministers across the country have also
been caught stealing sermons. Sometimes it makes the newspapers, but other times
congregations or denominations handle the matter quietly.
Gene Edward Veith, "Word for word RELIGION: More and more pastors lift entire
sermons off the internet—but is the practice always wrong?" World Magazine,
April 22, 2005 ---
http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=10576

Question
Where are your students going for help with term paper assignments?

New measures to help detect cheating students are being
demonstrated at a conference in Newcastle.

A survey of around 350 undergraduates found nearly 25%
had copied text from another source at least once.

A new service that can scan 4.5 billion web pages is
now online so that lecturers can check the originality of the work submitted
by students.

The software is being demonstrated at a meeting of
the Plagiarism Advisory Service at Northumbria University.

'Originality report'

Student Tom Lenham said of the statistics:
"That's a pretty modest interpretation of the situation at the moment.

"From my own experience and that of fellow
students, it's a lot higher than that because it is not drummed into our heads
from the start.

"Only more recently have we been told how to use
the internet for referencing."

The Plagiarism Advisory Service says cheating is not
a new phenomenon but the internet has led to concerns within the academic
community that the problem is set to increase dramatically.

The service manager Fiona Duggan said: "The
software has four databases that it checks students' work against and produces
an originality report which highlights where it has found matches.

"It demonstrates where the student has lifted
text from, and it also takes you to the source where the match was
found."

The software has been developed in the USA and the
Plagiarism Advisory Service hopes it will go some way to stamping out the
practice.

Ms Duggan said: "There are other things that can
be done, like the way you set assignments so each student has something
individual to put into the assignment so it is not so easy to copy."

Questions
Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to help write her
dissertation?
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course
project, take home exam, or term paper?

Question (from "Honest John"): I'm a
troubled member of a dissertation committee at Private U, where I'm not a
regular faculty member (although I have a doctorate). "Bertha" is a
"mature" student in chronological terms only. The scope of her
dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is
substandard. The committee chair just told me that Bertha is hiring an editor
to "assist" her in writing her dissertation. I'm outraged. I've
complained to the chair and the director of doctoral studies, but if Bertha is
allowed to continue having an "editor" to do her dissertation,
shouldn't I report the university to an accreditation agency? This is too big
a violation of integrity for me to walk away.

Answer: Ms. Mentor shares your outrage -- but first,
on behalf of Bertha, who has been betrayed by her advisers.

In past generations, the model of a modern
academician was a whiz-kid nerd, who zoomed through classes and degrees, never
left school, and scored his Ph.D. at 28 or so. (Nietzsche was a full professor
at 24.) Bertha is more typical today. She's had another life first.

Most likely she's been a mom and perhaps a
blue-collar worker -- so she knows about economics, time management, and child
development. Maybe she's been a musician, a technician, or a mogul -- and now
wants to mentor others, pass on what she's known. Ms. Mentor hears from many
Berthas.

Returning adult students are brave. "Phil"
found that young students called him "the old dude" and snorted when
he spoke in class. "Barbara" spent a semester feuding with three
frat boys after she told them to "stop clowning around. I'm paying good
money for this course." And "Millie's" sister couldn't
understand her thirst for knowledge: "Isn't your husband rich enough so
you can just stay home and enjoy yourself?"

Some tasks, Ms. Mentor admits, are easier for the
young -- pole-vaulting, for instance, and pregnancy. Writing a memoir is
easier when one is old. And no one under 35, she has come to suspect, should
give anyone advice about anything. But Bertha's problem is more about academic
skills than age.

Her dissertation plan may be too ambitious, and her
writing may be rusty -- but it's her committee's job to help her. All
dissertation writers have to learn to narrow and clarify their topics and pace
themselves. That is part of the intellectual discipline. Dissertation writers
learn that theirs needn't be the definitive word, just the completed one, for
a Ph.D. is the equivalent of a union card -- an entree to the profession.

But instead of teaching Bertha what she needs to
know, her committee (except for Honest John) seems willing to let her hire a
ghost writer.

Ms. Mentor wonders why. Do they see themselves as
judges and credential-granters, but not teachers? Ms. Mentor will concede that
not everyone is a writing genius: Academic jargon and clunky sentences do give
her twitching fits. But while not everyone has a flair, every academic must
write correct, clear, serviceable prose for memos, syllabuses, e-mail
messages, reports, grant proposals, articles, and books.

Being an academic means learning to be an academic
writer -- but Bertha's committee is unloading her onto a hired editor, at her
own expense. Instead of birthing her own dissertation, she's getting a
surrogate. Ms. Mentor feels the whole process is fraudulent and shameful.

What to do?

Ms.Mentor suggests that Honest John talk with Bertha
about what a dissertation truly involves. (He may include Ms. Mentor's column
on "Should You Aim to Be a Professor?") No one seems to have told
Bertha that it is an individual's search for a small corner of truth and that
it should teach her how to organize and write up her findings.

Moreover, Bertha may not know the facts of the job
market in her field. If she aims to be a professor but is a mediocre writer,
her chances of being hired and tenured -- especially if there's age
discrimination -- may be practically nil. There are better investments.

But if Bertha insists on keeping her editor, and her
committee and the director of doctoral studies all collude in allowing this
academic fraud to take place, what should Honest John do?

He should resign from the committee, Ms. Mentor
believes: Why spend his energies with dishonest people? He will have exhausted
"internal remedies" -- ways to complain within the university -- and
it is a melancholy truth that most bureaucracies prefer coverups to
confrontations. If there are no channels to go through, Honest John may as
well create his own -- by contacting the accrediting agencies, professional
organizations in the field, and anyone else who might be interested.

Continued in the article.

Why not hire Google to write all or parts of her
dissertation dissertation? (See below)

The first deals with the revelation that “her
dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is
substandard”.

The editing of a manuscript is a completely different
issue.

The ambiguity of the research and the flaws with the
proposal should be addressed far more forcefully than the editing issue!

Care should be used to ensure that the editor simply
edits (corrects grammar, tense, case, person, etc.), and isn’t responsible
for the creation of ideas. But if the editor is a professional editor who
understands the scope of his/her job, I don’t see why editing should be an
issue for anyone, unless the purpose of the dissertation exercise is to
evaluate the person’s mastery of the minutiae of the English language (in
which case the editor is indeed inappropriate).

Talk about picking your battles … I’d be a lot
more upset about ambiguous research than whether someone corrected her
sentence structure. I believe the whistle-blower needs to take a closer look
at his/her priorities. A flag needs to be raised, but about the more important
of the two issues.

I suspect that paying to have your writing edited, revised, and
translated is as old as writing itself. Networking technology has simply
made it faster, easier, and in many instances cheaper. What is a
problem is that a student who writes very badly may never be discovered
in college if writing is required only for assignments outside the
classroom. This speaks in favor of essay examinations along the way.

There is certainly nothing illegal about an
editing service, and it would be tough to say outside editing is
unethical except for assignments that require or request that the
author's work must be entirely in his/her own words.

Of course this particular service in Canada may entail both editing
and translating (from Canadian into English) --- just kidding.

If such a service also adds new content, then the ethical issues are
very clear since the author might take credit for the new content where
credit is not due. The author also takes a chance that the new content
might be plagiarized.

I had a student some years ago that submitted a term paper that was
plagiarized entirely from three separate sources (that I found with a
Google search). In dealing with the student and his parents, I
discovered that he was not aware that his AIS paper was plagiarized. He
was a young CEO of one of his father's AIS companies. He (my student)
hired one of his employees to write the paper. The employee actually
plagiarized the work to be submitted in the name of my student.

The question in this case is what is worse --- plagiarizing from
published sources or hiring the writing of the term paper? In either
case, the rule infraction would get the student an F from me and a
report of the incident to the Academic Vice President of the University.

Interestingly, the student approached me about five years later and
asked if the time limit on his F grade had expired. He wanted to submit
a new paper. I told him that F grades do not expire even after
graduation.

"Plagiarism is a constant concern in the
academic world particularly in areas that involve a lot of research or
term paper writing, such as English Literature. The Internet seems to be
making plagiarism easier as are companies that specialize in academic
research writing for hire. However, several experts believe that most
plagiarism takes place because students do not fully understand how to
perform proper scholarly research and integrate it into their own
material. In the end, plagiarism seems to stem more from a lack of
knowledge rather than a plot to undermine education."

Years ago I too thought that dishonesty was
caused by a lack of knowledge. The cure: tell students the general rule
(don't take credit for the work of others) and how that rule applies in
your course (give specific examples of how students could trip up). I
work hard at the cognitive factor, going so far as to give a *quiz* on
our honesty rules, in the first week of classes.

Experience can be a cruel teacher. I now think
that most students are dishonest because it's easy to be dishonest and
easy to get away with dishonesty. The problem is not a cognitive one.
It's an ethical one, having a grounding in what is culturally acceptable
at an institution.

It's not a problem in just English 101.
Plagiarism is a serious issue in any course that involves
computer-generated files. It's easy in any MIS or AIS course to copy
someone else's application program and make some simple modifications to
avoid detection. Students learn this right away. Actually, they have
know this since high school or even earlier.

My primary concern as an educator is: are
students learning? Surely this is obvious: those who are copying, are
not learning. If only the small minority of students were at fault, I
would not worry so much. But I think the problem is worsening rapidly.
It's now possible to reach a tipping point: most of the class copying
most of the time, so that not much is learned by the end of the
semester. I actually had a section that came pretty close to that status
last semester.

Students will not police themselves, at least
not here, so I do not have a solution for the problem. It would be nice
to have a utility (like turnitin.com) that would answer the question:
"Was the contents of this Excel/Access/VB/etc file copied or imported
from some other file?" You can no longer get the answer to that question
reliably using Windows time stamping. One of my summer To-Do's is to
write that program in VB, but I'll have to learn a lot about Windows
file structures to do that, and I'll probably not have time to get to
it.

It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has
reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any
source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't think
it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a cheater.

It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has
reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any
source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't
think it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a
cheater.

There’s more than one cultural bias illustrated in
the quote. Not everyone, fortunately, is embedded in the narrow and biased
views of the writer.

Henry

June 26, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Throughout the world in modern times I think borrowing works without
proper citation is considered unethical. In some parts of the world such as
Germany there was (and possibly still is) an exception made for students
where the work of the student was viewed as the work of the professor. I'm
not certain about this exception in modern times, but some professors in the
past purportedly put their names on entire books written by students without
even acknowledging the students. Presumably these professors also kept the
book royalties with clear consciences. I think this practice was more common
in the physical sciences.

A exception which does still exist in modern times arises when a noted
professor, often a senior researcher from a highly prestigious university,
lends his/her name to a textbook to improve its marketing potential. I know
of one instance in an accounting textbook with four authors where one of the
authors wrote over 90% of the material and the other authors mostly lent
their names and affiliations. I know of other instances where a senior
professor from a huge program did very little of the writing of the textbook
but greatly increased the chances that his university would provide sales of
over 1,000 copies of the book each year. Such marketing ploys might be
viewed as deceptive, although can it be called plagiarism when the principal
author of possibly 100% of the writing encourages someone else to share in
the "authorship credit?"

Something similar happens for journal articles to improve their chances
for publication in a leading journal. There is also the even more common
happening where one author who writes poorly did the research and wrote a
very rough first draft. Then a highly skilled writer who does little or no
research anymore performs a great editing service and receives full credit
as a partner in the research. In this case the paper's editor may be getting
far more credit for the "research" than is deserving.

>Throughout the world in modern times I think
borrowing works without proper citation is considered unethical.

Bob, while this might hold true for academic work,
it certainly does not seem to apply to the journalistic world, does it?
(Think: WV Coal Mine Disaster; Think: Hurricane Katrina at the New Orleans
Stadium; Think: any one of hundreds of other media screwups in the past few
months where so-called "news" media reported a story as though the reporter
were reporting first-hand facts when in reality the reporter was "copying"
from an unreliable (and false) source, -- all without proper citation.

And in some instances, a few journalists are so
unethical that they even go so far as to try to HIDE their sources and keep
them secret! Talk about lack of proper attribution! Some even claim a
constitutional right to do so! ;-)

And no, the citation of "a reliable source" is not
proper citation; if you think it is, just try getting one of those past ANY
reviewer for any decent journal! I can see it now: a bibliography containing
sixteen entries of "A reliable source", "ibid".

On another note, I have it "from a reliable source"
that in times past, (specifically the 16th century art world), it was not
considered wrong to borrow works from other people without attribution. (My
source here is the art curator at the Rubens House museum in Antwerp,
Belgium.) Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyke, and most of the other great
"masters" of the art world back then ran studios to train young artists in
the guild craft. The master would sketch a scene, the young artist would
paint it, the master might touch up a little here and there, and ultimately
would sign it, giving the student no recognition or attribution whatsoever.
With the master's signature, the piece would sell handsomely, the master
would pay the student a cut, and keep the rest. This was a widely known, and
perfectly acceptable, practice of the day. There are dozens of Van Dykes,
Rembrandts, Rubens, and other great works which show very little evidence of
ever being touched by the person who signed the painting. Everyone of the
day actually knew it, but it was an acceptable practice as long as the
student was a student of the master. It was the master's name which sold the
painting. Marketing, marketing.

Of course, to be realistic, I tend to agree with
Robert Holmes. Most of the college students I encounter these days do know
perfectly well that what they are doing is wrong in most cases, but plead
ignorance and invoke the "cultural victim" mentality when caught. And when I
do have the occasional student from another culture, I make an extra effort
to clarify what is and is not acceptable. (I don't know what the culture is
in Ghana, for example, but when caught, my Ghana student admitted knowing
she had violated the honor code, in addition to violating the instructions
clearly printed on the assignment.)

But as Carol pointed out, the chase, the hunt, the
hiding, is all part of the game which some students see as being part of the
"essence" of preparing for the real world: college.

In the doctoral program I am now pursuing on-line
through Capella, the learners are provided with access to mydropbox.com and
encouraged to submit their draft papers "to help with citation issues and
improper source referencing. After submission, mydropbox.com will generate a
plagiarism report within 24 hours ... for your personal use." I found the
report to be very interesting in that it picked up something that had been
published in a rather obscure journal which I had written myself last year!

Rarely do political scandal and academe collide so
publicly as they have now, in Europe. In February, Germany's education
minister stepped down after Heinrich Heine University, in Düsseldorf,
revoked her doctorate because her thesis lifted passages from other sources
without proper attribution.

Her departure came after scandals over plagiarized
work took down a German defense minister, the president of Hungary, and a
Romanian education minister. But it is the storied German university system,
not politics, that has suffered the real body blows, say education experts.

The front-page news has shaken higher education in
Germany, where, in addition to the two former federal ministers, several
other national and local political figures have been accused of academic
fraud. The incidents have left many wondering: Is there something rotten at
the heart of German academe, the esteemed heir of Humboldt and Hegel?

For two centuries, the German university as
envisioned by the 19th-century philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt has been the
model for research institutions in Europe, the United States, and beyond.
Humboldt's notions of academic freedom, the autonomy of the university, and
placing scientific pursuit at the heart of higher education continue to
carry weight today. But his legacy in Germany may be growing somewhat
tarnished.

"The reputation of German universities is
suffering, and it looks like it will suffer for some time to come," says
Wolfgang E.J. Weber, director of the Institute for European Cultural
History, in Augsburg, Germany, and author of a book on the history of the
European university.

As a result of the scandals, he says, his historian
colleagues from elsewhere in Europe no longer consider the German system to
be the gold standard. Noting that the allegations of academic fraud have
affected doctoral graduates in the humanities and liberal arts, Mr. Weber
worries that if financing for disciplines in those areas suffers as a
result, "the negative consequences could be long-term."

In Germany academic titles play a role in politics
far greater than they do in the United States. Doctoral and other titles,
sometimes as many as three or four, are prominently displayed on the
business cards, door plaques, and letterheads of politicians. Some call it
posturing—a modern-day "nobleman's title"—while others defend it as a
meaningful distinction based on merit.

"In the German context, the academic title means
more than just an expertise, say, in economics or law, that can be valuable
to policy making or another field," says Thomas Rommel, rector of the
European College of Liberal Arts of Bard, in Berlin, and author of a book
about plagiarism in general. "It connotes personal achievement, an element
of determination and grit to pursue a specialized topic for three years and
see it through."

Whether one is impressed by the degree or not, the
Ph.D. has become a facet of the German résumé that lures ambitious
politicians and professionals who have no intention of entering academe.
That has led to a proliferation of Ph.D.'s—roughly 25,000 a year awarded
since 2000, more per capita than any other country in the world, according
to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. By comparison, American
universities award 50,000 doctorates a year, but in a country with a
population four times as large as Germany's.

Germany's output of Ph.D. recipients probably won't
slow down, but the plagiarism cases have shined a spotlight on academe's
time-honored methods for supervising and awarding doctorates, especially to
candidates who are not full-time academics.

"In theory," says Martin Spiewak, education editor
at the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, "the professional with hands-on
experience in a given field, like a politician, can through a dissertation
bring something new into the world of scholarship that others can then
profit from. It could be a unique, constructive link between the
professional and the academic worlds."

Jensen Comment
Centuries ago Oxford was a collection of colleges rather than a university. When
I lectured at Humboldt University in Berlin a few years ago, it was claimed that
the idea of a university as opposed to a collection of colleges was conceived at
Humboldt ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University

Prior to the 20th Century the works of students became the works of their
professors and were sometimes published without even giving credit to the
original authors. Of course times have changed, although they perhaps changed a
bit slower in Germany.

It was hard to sleep at night in my hotel because skyscrapers were being
built 24/7 with lots of noise, loud radios, and men yelling loudly in Russian.
Apparently Russian workers were imported to do a lot of the construction work. I
thought it was ironic that the Russians destroyed Berlin and then were called
back to rebuild it.

Market for Admissions Test Questions and Essay "Consulting"

This type of cheating raises all sorts of legal issues yet to be resolved
for students who might've thought what they did was perfectly legal

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid
$30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the
Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their
scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be
effectively over. On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission
Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site,
Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and
is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information. GMAC said any students
found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the
schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be
permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the
students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy
Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and
we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat,
your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."
Louis Lavelle, "Shutting Down a GMAT Cheat Sheet: A court order against a
Web site that gave away test questions could land some B-school students in hot
water," Business Week, June 23, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2008/bs20080623_153722.htm

Jensen Comment
A university admissions office that refused to accept applications from the
"cheating" prospective MBA students would probably be sued by one or more
students. GMAC would probably be sued as well. But it's hard to sue a U.S.
District Court.

There are several moral issues here. From above, this is clearly cheating.
But in various parts of society exam questions and answers are made available
for study purposes. For example, preparation manuals for drivers license tests
usually contain all the questions that might be asked on the written test. It is
entirely possible that some MBA applicants fell for a scam that they believed
was entirely legitimate. Now their lives are being messed up.

I guess this is a test of the old saying that "Ignorance is no defense" in
the eyes of the law. Clearly from any standpoint, they were taking advantage of
other students who did not have the cheat sheets. But the cheat sheets were
apparently available to anybody in the world for a rather modest fee, albeit an
illegal fee. Every buyer did not know it was illegal.

For a long time, b-school applicants have had it
good. Submit an MBA application to Harvard, and who’s going to know if you
send the same one to Wharton? And Columbia? And Yale? Turn in an essay with
a few well-chosen words lifted from an online source, or a friend’s essay,
and who’s the wiser? Well, those days are over my friends. O-V-E-R, over.

Turnitin.com, the web site that professors have
been using for years to check student research papers for plagiarism, is now
turning it’s attention to admissions essays, with Turnitin for Admissions.
The new service, which was announced in December, checks admissions essays
submitted by participating schools against a massive database that contains
billions of pages of web content as well as more than 100 million student
works previously submitted to Turnitin and millions of pages of proprietary
content, including journals and books. It’s capable, the company says, of
flagging instances of “plagiarism, recycled submissions, duplicate
responses, purchased documents, and other violations of academic standards.”

No b-schools have signed up for the service yet,
but it seems only a matter of time. The service was started by popular
demand from colleges and universities, and b-school admissions directors are
as vocal as any in their complaints about duplicate essays and similar
problems.

And they don’t even know the half of it. Back in
2007, in anticipation of the new service, Turnitin undertook a study of
every single undergraduate admissions essay submitted over the course of a
year in a large (unnamed) English-speaking country, all told, about 453,000
“personal statements” received by more than 300 institutions of higher
education. About 200,000 of them were found to include text that matched
sources in the Turnitin database.

In all, more than a million matches were found (5
for each of the 200,000 essay). Half the matches were from online sources,
with 29% coming from student documents (research papers, etc.) and 20%
coming from other admissions documents. Turnitin’s conclusion: that 36% of
the matches it found were suspected plagiarism. Here’s an excerpt from the
Turnitin report:

Personal statements attached to university
applications should be the work of that applicant and help the university
know more about the perspective applicant. It is safe to assume that more
that 70,000 applicants that applied though this system did so with
statements that may not have been their own work. The number of Internet
sites that matched personal statement/essay providing services leads one to
question the additional 100,000 applicants whose personal statement
contained a significant match (they may have borrowed or purchased all or
part of their personal statement). The list of internet sites where most of
this poaching went on includes Wikipedia, the BBC, the Guardian newspaper,
as well as numerous sites designed specifically to help students with their
essays, including Peterson’s Essayedge.com. A few of the sites belonged to
admissions consultants, including Accepted.com and EssayEdge.com, and few
others, if you can believe this, actually belong to schools themselves,
including online writing labs at Purdue University and Ohio State.

I really don’t know where to begin. If the Turnitin
study is at all representative of the current state of college admissions,
it seems safe to assume that more than a few current MBAs, and quite a few
MBA alumni who have gone on to bigger and better things, started out their
academic lives committing the cardinal sin of the academy, and a serious
breach of ethics. If they stammered through the essays on their own, without
the benefit of cutting and pasting, would they have been admitted?
Impossible to say. Did not getting caught encourage them to go on to bigger
and better lies? Again, nobody knows.

I’m willing to entertain any opposing viewpoint
that makes a modicum of sense, but I’m not sure there is one. Is duplicating
your admissions essay okay? Is plagiarizing someone else’s work in an essay
ever permissable?

Continued in article

"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill,"
by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 ---
Click Here

Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda
Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale.
And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same
scenario has played out many times before.

The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web
sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work
and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.

For the first time, however, those who find
unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal
retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making
its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider
liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site
is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.

A test-preparation company in Texas is being sued
by the College Board for what it calls "one of the largest cases of a
security breach in our company's history," according to Edna Johnson, a
senior vice president of the nonprofit group, which owns the SAT.

In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court
in Dallas, the College Board is seeking unspecified damages against the
company, Karen Dillard's College Prep LP, which it says illegally obtained
copies of SAT and PSAT tests before they were available to the public. The
lawsuit also accuses the company of violating copyright-protection laws by
circulating and selling materials that included test questions owned by the
College Board.

The lawsuit arose after a former employee of the
test-preparation company reported information to the College Board. Karen
Dillard, the owner of the company, said the employee was disgruntled but
would not elaborate on why.

Ms. Dillard did not deny that one of her employees
obtained a copy of the SAT that was administered in November 2006 before the
test was given. But Ms. Dillard said her company did not use any questions
from that test in preparatory materials it provided to clients.

The lawsuit states that the employee got the test
from his brother, the principal of a high school in Plano, Tex. The
principal has been put on paid leave while the Plano school district
investigates the matter, according to the Associated Press.

Copyright Confusion

In reference to the copyright allegations in the
lawsuit, Ms. Dillard said in an interview on Friday that she had believed
she was lawfully allowed to use materials she had purchased from the College
Board before 2005.

Part of the confusion may stem from a shift in the
College Board's policies regarding circulation of previous test materials.
Until 2005, the company would sell copies of previously given SAT's to
companies. After the SAT was revamped that year, the College Board no longer
sold those materials. At that time, the company also began to offer its own
online test-preparation course to students, which now costs $69.95.

"We believe part of the motivation of the College
Board in bringing this lawsuit," Ms. Dillard said, "is to drive
test-preparation companies like ours out of business so they can dominate
the industry with their own test-preparation materials, which are for sale."

Ms. Dillard said she also thinks that the College
Board is going to great efforts to publicize the lawsuit to make an example
out of her company. To support that point, she said that Justin Pope, a
higher-education reporter for the Associated Press, received a copy of the
lawsuit and contacted her for comment before it was filed.

When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Pope said he
could not confirm how or when he received the lawsuit, and could not comment
further about the matter.

The lawsuit is the culmination of a four-month
investigation by lawyers for the College Board. Two lawyers from the firm
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, along with a representative for
the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, visited Ms.
Dillard's office several months ago.

Ms. Dillard said that, at that time, her company
fully cooperated with all requests for information and interviews with
employees, and that she also provided personal financial records to the
lawyers.

Ms. Dillard also said that her company offered to
settle the matter for $300,000, but that lawyers for the College Board made
a counteroffer of $1.25-million, a sum her company could not afford.

Ms. Johnson, of the College Board, said she could
not comment on any offers made in settlement negotiations.

“Vault is collecting successful admissions essays
for top MBA programs, including Wharton — and will pay $40 for each main
essay (main personal statement greater than 500 words), and $15 for each
minor essay (secondary essay answering a specific question less than 500
words) that we accept for our admissions essay section.”

That message, recently sent out from a top company
that helps students get into business schools, is enough to irk even the
most experienced admissions officers at some the nation’s leading business
schools.

“Some of our admissions counselors have gotten
outraged,” says Thomas R. Caleel, director of MBA admissions at the Wharton
School at the University of Pennsylvania. “We want students to be giving
their real stories, not some ‘polished’ or even ‘over-polished’ versions of
themselves.”

“Essays have to be meaningful per person,” he adds.
“It might be helpful to see some successful essays, but in my mind, it might
also be limiting. Someone might read one [of the consultant-produced essays]
and think that their essays have to read the same way, in order to get in.”

Those sentiments are being expressed by an
increasing number of business school officials who say that students
shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to make themselves appear
different than who they really are. While some officials plan to go on the
offensive against firms that they find particularly egregious, others want
to work more closely with consultants. Still others say that there is little
they can do to prevent the phenomenon.

Deans at seven of the top American business schools
are expected to address such issues at an upcoming gathering, according to a
Monday report in The Boston Globe. In an effort to “remove the possibility
of outside interference,” Derrick Bolton, director of admissions at the
Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the paper that deans are
considering making students complete their essays under supervision,
providing different essays to students in the same applicant pool, and
conducting more interviews and follow-up with references.

While the proliferation of admissions consultants
of various sorts has frustrated officials in undergraduate admissions as
well, especially at elite institutions, the steps being considered by
business schools could amount to a much more aggressive stance against the
application-consulting industry.

“Part of getting the best candidates is for them to
be themselves during the admissions process,” says Caleel. “We really want
to get to know the real person who is applying.” Wharton’s business school
dean, Patrick Harker, is expected to be part of the group that will meet to
discuss consultant issues.

While Vault officials could not be reached for
comment on Monday, Alex Brown, a senior admissions counselor at ClearAdmit,
in Philadelphia, says that not all consulting firms function the same way.
“Some businesses are bad,” he says, “but the bulk of us, that’s not the way
we operate.”

Continued in article

This service
from Google Answers was disturbing until Google shut
it down

Students can now pay to have their homework
answered by experts.

Some claim using the Net to do homework
shows that today's kids are resourceful. But a rise in content cribbed straight
from online sources, like Google Answers, has teachers on alert.
"Thin Line Splits Cheating, Smarts," vy Dustin Goot, Wired News,
September 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54963,00.html

Most teachers wouldn't
be surprised to hear that students have bribed friends or siblings to do their
homework in exchange for a few bucks.

What might surprise
them is that Google Answers sometimes
takes school kids up on the offer.

Staffed by a cadre of
500-plus freelance researchers, the service takes people's questions -- for
example, a calculus problem or a term paper topic -- and provides answers and
links to information. Google charges a listing fee of 50 cents and, if someone
comes up with a satisfactory response, the user pays that researcher a
previously entered bid (minimum: $2).

Although Google
Answers has a policy encouraging students to use the service as a study aid
rather than a substitution for original work, several cases show that students
often ignore this advice.

One student
in Quebec, dismayed by a response that offered only background research for a
paper on religion, pleads, "Make it into an essay, not just links and
quotes. I need this asap PLEASE!!! 2500 words is the minimum."

While researchers are
scrupulous enough not to churn out a completed term paper -- despite the
Quebec student's $55 bid -- other potential homework questions, such as math
or science problems, can be harder to identify. In some cases researchers
acknowledge that a question looks like homework -- but they still provide the
answer.

The dilemma faced by
Google Answers researchers highlights a broader issue that vexes many
educators around the country. Namely, where do you draw the line between
appropriate and inappropriate uses of the Internet and how do you stamp out
clear abuses such as cutting and pasting entire paragraphs into an essay?

The question first
entered many educators' consciousness following a Kansas
cheating scandal earlier in the year that made national headlines. At
Piper High School, near Kansas City, a biology teacher failed 28 of 118
students for plagiarism on an assignment that consisted of collecting and
gathering information about local leaves.

However, many
students (and their parents) contended that there was nothing improper about
the leaf descriptions they submitted, which had been lifted straight from the
Internet. Others claimed it was unclear where proper citation was required.

Tamara Ballou, who is
helping implement an honor code at her Falls Church, Virginia, high
school, said that it is not uncommon for teachers and students to disagree
on what constitutes academic dishonesty.

"We took a long
time to define cheating," she said, noting that many kids felt it was
acceptable to copy homework from each other or off the Internet if the
assignment was perceived as "busy work."

"A lot of kids
don't even know what (plagiarism) is," agreed Kevin Huelsman. "They
say, 'Yeah, I did the work; I brought it over (from the Internet).'"

Faculty are reluctant to take action against
suspected cheaters. In a 1999 survey of over 1,000 faculty on 21 campuses,
one-third of those who were aware of student cheating in their course in the
last two years, did nothing to address it. Students
suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that faculty
members are likely to ignore cheating.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and
first president of CAI) --- See below

Academic honor codes effectively reduce cheating.
Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over 12,000 students on 48
different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor codes and student
involvement in the control of academic dishonesty. Serious test cheating on
campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on
campuses that do not have honor codes. The level of serious cheating on written
assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and
first president of CAI) --- See below

The Center for Academic Integrity is
affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. We gratefully acknowledge their financial and programmatic
assistance, as well as funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
and the John Templeton Foundation.

CAI is a consortium of
over 225 institutions who share with peers and colleagues the Center’s
collective experience, expertise, and creative energy.

Benefits of membership include:

Gathering and sharing information
about academic integrity;

An annual conference and faculty
institute; periodic mailings; a newsletter; an electronic listserv; a
website with both public and member-only access; and presentations at the
conference of other associations as well as on the campuses of member
institutions;

Encouraging and supporting
research on factors that impact academic integrity;

Identifying and describing
fundamental vales of academic integrity and the sustaining practices that
support those values on a variety of college and university campuses;

Helping faculty members in
different disciplines develop pedagogies that encourage adherence to these
fundamental values;

Showcasing successful approaches
to academic integrity from school around the country – policies,
enforcement procedures, sanctions, research, curricular materials, and
education/prevention programs; and,

Providing individual consultation
on ways to promote an honest climate of learning.

Research projects conducted by Donald
L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI), have had
disturbing, provocative, and challenging results, among them the following:

On most campuses, over 75% of
students admit to some cheating. In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21
campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students
admitted to serious test cheating and half admitted to one or more
instances of serious cheating on written assignments.

Academic honor codes effectively
reduce cheating. Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over
12,000 students on 48 different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor
codes and student involvement in the control of academic dishonesty.
Serious test cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2
lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes. The level
of serious cheating on written assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.

Internet plagiarism is a growing
concern on all campuses as students struggle to understand what
constitutes acceptable use of the Internet. In the absence of clear
direction from faculty, most students have concluded that 'cut &
paste' plagiarism - using a sentence or two (or more) from different
sources on the Internet and weaving this information together into a paper
without appropriate citation - is not a serious issue. While 10% of
students admitted to engaging in such behavior in 1999, this rose to 41%
in a 2001 survey with the majority of students (68%) suggesting this was
not a serious issue.

Faculty are reluctant to take
action against suspected cheaters. In a 1999 survey of over 1,000 faculty
on 21 campuses, one-third of those who were aware of student cheating in
their course in the last two years, did nothing to address it. Students
suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that
faculty members are likely to ignore cheating.

Longitudinal comparisons show
significant increases in serious test/examination cheating and unpermitted
student collaboration. For example, the number of students self-reporting
instances of unpermitted collaboration at nine medium to large state
universities increased from 11% in a 1963 survey to 49% in 1993. This
trend seems to be continuing: between 1990 and 1995, instances of
unpermitted collaboration at 31 small to medium schools increased from 30%
to 38%.

A study of almost 4,500 students
at 25 schools, conducted in 2000/2001, suggests cheating is also a
significant problem in high school - 74% of the respondents admitted to
one or more instances of serious test cheating and 72% admitted to serious
cheating on written assignments. Over half of the students admitted they
have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments using the
Internet.

The 2008-09 Honor Committee released statistics
last week about the demographics of cases reviewed during its term. Although
the data dealt specifically with cases reported, accused and brought to
trial, the information also lends itself to several discussions about some
students’ concerns pertaining to the University’s honor system and
diversity.

Reporting

One of the most obvious areas of interest within
the statistics were the numbers that dealt specifically with reporting.
According to the statistics, a total of 64 cases were brought before the
past Committee. Of these cases, 27 reports were brought against white
students, 21 against black students, 11 against Asian and/or Asian-American
students, four against Latinos and four against students of unknown race.

“When I saw [the statistics], I was a little bit
surprised at the disproportionate number of minority students reported
compared to [white] students,” said Vice Chair for Investigations Mary
Siegel, a third-year College student.

“Looking at these numbers, there are almost as many
[black] students reported as [white] students, which is not at all
proportional [to the actual number of students enrolled at the University],”
Siegel said.

These concerns with respect to reporting extend
beyond just Committee members, however.

“In terms of data collection, I can’t help but be
startled by the discrepancy,” African-American Affairs Dean Maurice Apprey
said.

Another alleged discrepancy is the ratio of cases
brought against males to those brought against females. The statistics show
that 48 males were reported of committing an honor offense, whereas only 18
females were reported.

Some members of the University attribute such
statistical discrepancies to spotlighting, which is when certain minorities
— such as blacks, athletes and Asians — are reported at a much higher rate
than white students for reasons like standing out in the room more, as well
as some reporters’ inherent biases.

“From a psychology point of view, sometimes you are
going to look at what’s different in the room,” said Black Student Alliance
President-elect Lauren Boswell, a third-year Architecture student.

Siegel said she hopes to help explore the reasons
behind allegedly biased reporting by speaking to reporters more frequently
than the current system allows.

“I think the first place we have to start is
reporters and ask them why they suspected this person of an the Committee
offense,” Siegel said. “If there seems to be a pattern, then the Committee
can try and correct that pattern.”

Currently reporters of an alleged honor offense are
involved in the first interview during the investigations process and then
during a rebuttal, but are removed from the investigations process, Siegel
said. Removing the reporter from the process ensures that his or her bias
does not play a part in investigations, Siegel added, but does not ensure
that there are not any biased motivations behind the initial report.

Accusations and Trials

After students are reported of having committed an
alleged honor offense, the case is taken up by the Investigative Panel,
which is comprised of three rotating Committee members, and examined to see
if an honor offense occurred. If the panel believes an offense occurred, the
student is formally accused and is brought to trial.

According to the statistics excluding last
weekend’s trials, 35 students were formally accused of committing an honor
offense by the I-Panel, 13 of whom were black. Twelve white students were
accused and 10 Asian and/or Asian-American students also were brought to
trial. A total of 29 trials, including last weekend’s trials, occurred
during the past Committee’s term. Of the 11 white students brought to trial,
six were found not guilty, whereas 14 of the 19 black students brought to
trial were found not guilty. A total of 32 males, meanwhile, were brought to
trial, nine of whom were found guilty. Comparatively, four of the 11 female
students brought to trial were found guilty.

After looking at the statistics, several Committee
members said they believe that any bias present in the beginning of the
honor trial process is lost during the process.

“Once a case comes into the system ... these
students are being found guilty at the same rate” regardless of race,
2007-08 Committee Chair Jess Huang said.

“I challenge the notion that students of different
color are on par with white students” after trials, Oronce said, noting that
though Committee members have told him a “balance” eventually exists, his
own data analysis yields different conclusions. He explained that his
conclusions are based on a study done six years ago; the Committee has yet
to do a similar study since.

“You’ll see that there’s something like a 6 percent
difference in guilt rate between [white] students and black students,”
Oronce said. “Six percent comes off to me as a huge difference.”

Oronce added that he believes that a more formal
study needs to be done to accurately see and analyze the alleged
disparities. Siegel also said she believes the Committee “needs to look at
ways to correct these imbalances” regardless of whether the imbalances come
into play during the actual investigation and trial process.

Representation, Recruitment and Retention

Several members of the University community also
have expressed concern about representation within the actual Committee
itself in regards to diversity.

“I think if you look at the Committee and support
officer pools, they are admittedly not very diverse,” said Committee Chair
David Truetzel, a third-year Commerce student. La Alianza Chair Carolina
Ferrerosa, a fourth-year College student, agreed, noting that one of her
organization’s major concerns is increasing diversity within the Committee.

“We would like to see more of a push” to get more
minority representatives on the Committee, and make sure that “the Committee
is realistic when it looks in the mirror,” Ferrerosa said.

Members and non-members alike hope that by
increasing minority representation within the Committee, other diversity
issues can be addressed, like increasing outreach and personal relationships
between minority contracted independent organizations and the Committee.

Vice Chair for Education Rob Atkinson, a third-year
College student, said he already has had several meetings aimed at improving
education efforts with some of these groups. He added that he feels it is
important to create a personal relationship between these groups and the
Committee before more formal relationships can be developed.

“We want to take into account the concerns or views
of the different communities when we reach out to those communities,”
Atkinson said. Reaching out to these groups, Truetzel added, will help
ensure that all students feel like the system belongs to them, no matter
their race or gender.

“When you lack diversity ... you don’t have
diversity of thought, diversity of ideas,” Truetzel said.

Apprey, meanwhile, agreed that increasing minority
representation on the Committee could lead to “healthy conversation, healthy
debates” and could help promote “further cultural competence” and
understanding.

To help increase representation, the Committee has
taken steps to improve recruitment and students attracted to joining the
Committee. BSA President-elect Boswell noted that the Committee has made an
effort to help promote recruitment among the black student community,
holding two honor education classes during both the fall and spring
semesters this academic year that encouraged members of the black community
to join the Committee.

Boswell said that first-year students in the black
community often are approached by a lot of different programs focused on
black students their first semester to create “a sense of family and place
here” at the University. It is therefore sometimes difficult, however, to
attract first-year students that are minorities within the Committee and
other organizations during their first semesters, Boswell said. By holding
an education class during the spring, Boswell said, the Committee “got
outstanding turnout for minorities.”

The Committee and BSA also held a study hall that
discussed both the Committee and UJC. Although Boswell said she thought it
was a success, she hopes in the future that it will become more “casual” so
that students will feel comfortable enough to have personal conversations.

Despite these efforts, there are still many things
the Committee can do to encourage minorities to participate in the honor
system, Boswell said. Even though the Committee attends The Source, the
black community’s activities fair, Boswell said she does not know if it is
“the most effective way” to help recruitment.

Oronce said consistent outreach efforts to these
different communities, rather than just right before elections or the
beginning of the year, could prove helpful for recruitment or maintaining
relationships.

In addition to issues of recruitment and
representation, Oronce said that many minority students end up quitting the
Committee because they feel uncomfortable and marginalized. Boswell added
that officer pool meetings can be isolating as students generally sit with
their friends. Though she said this might be found in any organization, she
also noted that it is imperative that the Committee makes sure every
minority student feels comfortable and included if they wish to maintain
diversity.

“This past year, there has been a move towards
getting a group that is more representative,” Huang said.

Oronce also said he believes that “this year is
definitely a lot better than last year” in terms of representation within
both the Committee and the support officer pool, but that there is still
room for improvement.

“Once we fix our problems internally, we will be in
a better place to discuss” some of these other issues of diversity and the
Committee, Siegel added.

FAC and DAB

The Committee’s educational outreach efforts are
not limited to students. Within the Committee, the Faculty Advisory
Committee and the Diversity Advisory Board were created to help address
issues with faculty members and diversity organizations. The FAC chair meets
with faculty members once a month to discuss faculty concerns and teach
aspects of honor, while the DAB works with Honor to increase Honor relevancy
and understanding with diverse groups.

In China it’s common to get spam
messages on your mobile phone—including advertisements promising to boost
your graduate-school admissions test scores and secure placement in MBA
programs. Reporters at CCTV decided to take one spammer up on the “academic”
offer in January–and then uncovered one of the largest organized
test-cheating rings yet discovered involving a Chinese B-school.

Stories about corruption in higher
education in China are depressingly common. Last fall, a high-ranking
admissions officer at Beijing’s prestigious Renmin
University – often called the Harvard of China – was apprehended at an
airport trying to flee the country with a fake passport. State media soon
reported that he had been accused of trading admissions spots for
bribes, sometimes as much as
1 million yuan(about $165,000). In 2012, another
professor at Renmin University, Cao Tingbing,
leapt to his death from a high-rise building amid
unconfirmed rumors of another admissions corruption scandal.

China’s graduate schools are not
immune to admissions irregularities. Recently CCTV reporters followed spam
messages to uncover a big one, as revealed in a
broadcastlast week. When an under-cover reporter
first visited the so-called Zhihengzhi Training Center in Beijing, he saw
files describing plans for test-takers to wear wireless earpieces through
which they would hear test answers dictated. Graduate school admissions
tests are administered at pre-arranged times in examination rooms monitored
by a university.

Because communication devices, such as
mobile phones and laptops, are not allowed in testing rooms, such a scam
could only work with the cooperation of one or more universities. CCTV
reporters discovered that Harbin Polytechnic University, which runs a
graduate MBA program, was cooperating with Zhihengzhi Training Center.

Easy A's may be even easier to score these days,
with the growing popularity of online courses. Tech-savvy students are
finding ways to cheat that let them ace online courses with minimal effort,
in ways that are difficult to detect.

Take Bob Smith, a student at a public university in
the United States. This past semester, he spent just 25 to 30 minutes each
week on an online science course, the time it took him to take the weekly
test. He never read the online materials for the course and never cracked
open a textbook. He learned almost nothing. He got an A.

His secret was to cheat, and he's proud of the
method he came up with—though he asked that his real name and college not be
used, because he doesn't want to get caught. It involved four friends and a
shared Google Doc, an online word-processing file that all five of them
could read and add to at the same time during the test.

More on his method in a minute. You've probably
already heard of plenty of clever ways students cheat, and this might simply
add one more to the list. But the issue of online cheating may rise in
prominence, as more and more institutions embrace online courses, and as
reformers try new systems of educational badges, certifying skills and
abilities learned online. The promise of such systems is that education can
be delivered cheaply and conveniently online. Yet as access improves, so
will the number of people gaming the system, unless courses are designed
carefully.

This prediction has not escaped many of those
leading new online efforts, or researchers who specialize in testing. As
students find new ways to cheat, course designers are anticipating them and
devising new ways to catch folks like Mr. Smith.

In the case of that student, the professor in the
course had tried to prevent cheating by using a testing system that pulled
questions at random from a bank of possibilities. The online tests could be
taken anywhere and were open-book, but students had only a short window each
week in which to take them, which was not long enough for most people to
look up the answers on the fly. As the students proceeded, they were told
whether each answer was right or wrong.

Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of
possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends
got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they
saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The
schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their
work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never
seen the material before, though he would search an online version of the
textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses. The
next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and
subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns
going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test twice,
with the two results averaged into a final score.

"So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but
we're all guaranteed an A in the end," Mr. Smith told me. "We're playing the
system, and we're playing the system pretty well."

He is a first-generation college student who says
he works hard, and honestly, in the rest of his courses, which are held
in-person rather than online. But he is juggling a job and classes, and he
wanted to find a way to add an easy A to his transcript each semester.

Although the syllabus clearly forbids academic
dishonesty, Mr. Smith argues that the university has put so little into the
security of the course that it can't be very serious about whether the
online students are learning anything. Hundreds of students took the course
with him, and he never communicated with the professor directly. It all felt
sterile, impersonal, he told me. "If they didn't think students would do
this, then they didn't think it through."

A professor familiar with the course, who also
asked not to be named, said that it is not unique in this regard, and that
other students probably cheat in online introductory courses as well. To
them, the courses are just hoops to jump through to get a credential, and
the students are happy to pay the tuition, learn little, and add an A.

"This is the gamification of education, and
students are winning," the professor told me.

Of course, plenty of students cheat in introductory
courses taught the old-fashioned way as well. John Sener, a consultant who
has long worked in online learning, says the incident involving Mr. Smith
sounds similar to students' sharing of old tests or bringing in cheat
sheets. "There is no shortage of weak assessments," he says.

He cautions against dismissing online courses based
on inevitable examples of poor class design: "If there are weaknesses in the
system, students will find them and try to game it."

In some cases, the answer is simply designing tests
that aren't multiple-choice. But even when professors assign papers,
students can use the Internet to order custom-written assignments. Take the
example of
the Shadow Scholar, who described in a
Chronicle article how he made more than $60,000 a year writing term
papers for students around the country.

Part of the answer may be fighting technology with
more technology, designing new ways to catch cheaters.

Countering the
Cheaters

When John Fontaine first heard about the Shadow
Scholar, who was helping students cheat on assignments, he grew angry. Mr.
Fontaine works for Blackboard, and his job is to think up new services and
products for the education-software company. His official title is senior
director of technology evangelism.

"I was offended," he says. "I thought, I'm going to
get that guy." So he started a research project to do just that.

Blackboard's learning-management software features
a service that checks papers for signs of plagiarism, and thousands of
professors around the country use it to scan papers when they are turned in.

Mr. Fontaine began to wonder whether authors write
in unique ways that amount to a kind of fingerprint. If so, he might be able
to spot which papers were written by the Shadow Scholar or other
writers-for-hire, even if they didn't plagiarize other work directly.

"People tend to use the same words over and over
again, and people have the same vocabulary," he says. "I've been working on
classifiers that take documents and score them and build what I call a
document fingerprint." The system could establish a document fingerprint for
each student when they turn in their first assignments, and notice if future
papers differ in style in suspicious ways.

Mr. Fontaine's work is simply research at this
point, he emphasizes, and he has not used any actual student papers
submitted to the company's system. He would have to get permission from
professors and students before doing that kind of live test.

In fact, he's not sure whether the idea will ever
work well enough to add it as a Blackboard feature.

Mr. Fontaine is not the only one doing such
research. Scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they are
looking for new ways to verify the identity of students online as well.

Anant Agarwal is head of MIT's Open Learning
Enterprise, which coordinates the university's MITx project to offer free
courses online and give students a chance to earn certificates. It's a
leading force in the movement to offer free courses online.

One challenge leaders face is verifying that online
students are who they say they are.

A method under consideration at MIT would analyze
each user's typing style to help verify identity, Mr. Agarwal told me in a
recent interview. Such electronic fingerprinting
could be combined with face-recognition software to ensure accuracy, he
says. Since most laptops now have Webcams built in, future online students
might have to smile for the camera to sign on.

Some colleges already require identity-verification
techniques that seem out of a movie. They're using products such as the
Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree
view around students, and Kryterion's Webassessor, which lets human proctors
watch students remotely on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.

One message from the event's organizers was that
groups that offer standardized tests, companies developing anticheating
software, and researchers need to join forces and share their work.
"Historically this kind of research has been a bit of a black box," says
Neal Kingston, an associate professor of education at the university and
director of its Center for Educational Testing Evaluation. "It's important
that the research community improve perhaps as quickly as the cheating
community is improving."

Continued in article

Question
Why do colleges have to identify each of their online students without the same
requirement imposed on onsite students?
My daughter took chemistry in a class of 600 students. They never carded her for
exams at the University of Texas?
How can you tell if an onsite or online student has not outsourced taking an
entire course with a fake ID? (see Comment 1 below)I know of an outsourcing case like this from years ago when I was an
undergraduate student, because I got the initial offer to take the course for
$500.
Fake IDs are easy to fabricate today on a computer. Just change the name and
student number on your own ID or change the picture and put the fake ID in
laminated plastic.

Online there's a simple way to authenticate honesty online. One way is to
have a respected person sign an attestation form. In 19th Century England the
Village Vicar signed off on submissions of correspondence course takers. There
are also a lot of
Sylvan Centers throughout the U.S. that will administer examinations.

To comply with the newly reauthorized
Higher Education Act,colleges have to verify the
identity of each of their online students.
Several toolscan help them do that, including the
Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree
view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors
watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.

Now colleges have a new option to show the
government that they’ll catch cheating in distance education. Acxiom
Corporation and Moodlerooms announced this month that they have integrated
the former’s identity-verification system, called FactCheck-X, into the
latter’s free, open-source course-management system, known as Moodle.

“The need to know that the student taking a test
online is in fact the actual one enrolled in the class continues to be a
concern for all distance-education programs,” Martin Knott, chief executive
of Moodlerooms, said in a
written statement.

FactCheck-X, which authenticates many
online-banking transactions, requires test takers to answer detailed,
personal “challenge” questions. The information comes from a variety of
databases, and the company uses it to ask for old addresses, for example, or
previous employers.

The new tool requires no hardware and operates
within the Moodle environment. Colleges themselves control how frequently
students are asked to verify their identities, Acxiom says, and because
institutions don’t have to release information about students, the system
fully complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Comments

Where’s the concern about whether that student
in the large course on campus is who he says he is? How many schools
really card students before exams are given in those courses?

— Steve Foerster Nov 11, 05:52 PM

My sentiments exactly, Steve! I am surprised
at the shift in thinking that somehow online students are more likely to
cheat than those who appear for exams onsite!

— Born to teach Nov 11, 06:03 PM

I’ve been teaching online for five years, and
I have found cheating to be much more prevalent in the online
environment. Most institutions use proctors for high stakes testing, and
student identification is presented. For purely online initiatives,
however, it simply doesn’t make sense to ask these students to come to
campus for assessments. No LMS currently
addresses this legislation to my knowledge, so it is interesting to
consider the options for compliance.

Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers
(and took two online courses for him)The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's
diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.

Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of
community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students
from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of
social belonging among online students might help universities fight another
problem: cheating.

In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio
University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed
an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly
higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place
primarily in a classroom.

“The more distant students are, the more
disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize
cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an
interview with Inside Higher Ed.

While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a
study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are
particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark
A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus,
said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and
professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor
codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social
connections.”

Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of
deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs
has given rise to a cottage industry of
remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic
fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment
with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project
suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of
online students as a rule.)

But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more
interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so,
then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating
tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to
the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in
the online environment.

They experimented with the effectiveness of honor
codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first
course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those
in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students,
mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no
honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14
multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the
term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of
them.

The second trial involved another fully online
introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the
class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code --
posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the
other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the
term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was
the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no
family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported
cheating between the two groups.

In a third trial, the professors repeated the
experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20
percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a
traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two
groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in
which they were not.

This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the
students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference:
Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to
cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had
not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.

LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no
definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to
cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of
opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to
do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives
relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest
to police.

“The bottom line is that if there are
opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities
they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon
professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be
contained.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think universities like Trinity University that expanded their honor codes to
include student courts are generally happy with the operations of those honor
codes. However, Trinity has only full time students and no distance education
courses.

One thing that I hated giving up was grading control. For most of my teaching
career I gave F grades to students who seriously cheated in my courses. Under
the revised Trinity Honor Code, instructors can no longer control the granting
of F grades for cheating.

When I was a student at Stanford the Honor Code included a pledge to report
cheating of other students. I think most universities have watered down this
aspect of their honor codes because, in this greatly increased era of
litigation, student whistle blowers can be sued big time. Universities may
continue to encourage such whistle blowing, but they no longer make students
sign pledges that on their honor they will be whistleblowers if they do not want
to bear the risk of litigation by students they report.

During his senior year, Shaun Sims took online
classes at the University of Texas at Austin to supplement his regular
courses. Some of his friends took online classes too, but they turned in
assignments that other people completed for them.

That's when Sims decided to do something to cut
back on cheating online. In 2009, he and computer science Ph.D student
Andrew Mills launched a startup company called Digital Proctor. By analyzing
each online participant's unique typing pattern, their software
authenticates the student's work.

“We verify that students who sign up are the same
students actually completing the coursework,” Sims said. "We make sure
students are who they say they are.”

Two customers are currently using the software in
pilot programs, including Midland College in Texas.

With the reauthorization of the Higher Education
Opportunity Act in 2008, colleges and universities must now meet 50 new
accountability requirements, one of which is making sure that the students
who sign up for online courses are the ones who are participating in it.
They have three options: use secure logins and passcodes; give proctored
examinations; or find new technologies that could verify students' identity.

Midland College already has the first two options,
but wants to be proactive in maintaining the integrity of their online
classes, said Dale Beikirch, dean of distance learning and continuing
education. So the college decided to enter a pilot with Digital Proctor.

“The day is coming when this secure login and
password is not going to be enough to authenticate students," Beikirch said,
"and that’s what’s sort of driving all of this is the need for schools to be
able to ensure that the person enrolled in a course is the one taking the
test.”

Question
What's the value of watching somebody send you an email message?

Answer
There may be some security and subtle communication advantages, but there's a
huge cost-benefit consideration. Is it worth valuable bandwidth costs to
transmit all that video of talking heads and hands? I certainly hope that most
of us do not jump into this technology "head" (get it?) first.

One huge possible benefits might be in distance
education. If a student in sending back test answers via email, it could add a
lot to the integrity of the testing process to watch the student over this new
video and audio channel from Google.

Google Inc. is introducing new tools that will
convert its free e-mail service into a video and audio channel for people
who want to see and hear each other while they communicate.

Activating the features, introduced Tuesday, will
require a free piece of software as well as a Webcam, which are becoming
more commonplace as computer manufacturers embed video equipment into
laptops.

Once the additional software is installed, Gmail
users will be given the option to see and hear each other without leaving
the e-mail application.

The video feature will work only if all the
participants have Gmail accounts. It's supposed to be compatible with
computers running the Windows operating system or Apple Inc.'s Mac
computers.

Google, the Internet's search leader, has been
adding more bells and whistles to Gmail as part of its effort to gain ground
on the longtime leaders in free e-mail, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Video chatting has long been available through the
instant messaging services offered by Yahoo and Microsoft, but the feature
isn't available in their free e-mail applications.

Although Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has
been making strides since it began welcoming all comers to Gmail early last
year, it remains a distant third with nearly 113 million worldwide users
through September -- a 34 percent increase from the previous year, according
to comScore Inc.

Microsoft's e-mail services boasted 283 million
worldwide users, up 13 percent from the previous year, while Yahoo was a
close second at 274 million, an 8 percent gain, comScore said.

ELEMENTS OF QUALITY
ONLINE EDUCATION: INTO THE MAINSTREAM, edited by John Bourne and Janet C.
Moore, is the fifth and latest volume in the annual Sloan-C series of case
studies on quality education online. Essays cover topics in the following
areas: student satisfaction and student success, learning effectiveness,
blended environments, and assessment. To order a copy of the book go to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp.
You can download a free 28-page summary of the book from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/vol5summary.pdf.

The Sloan Consortium
(Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to
help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of
their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that
education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for
anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C
is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.

2004) Neil C. Rowe
identifies "three of the most serious problems involving cheating in
online assessment that have not been sufficiently considered previously"
and suggests countermeasures to combat them. The problems Rowe discusses are:

-- Getting assessment
answers in advance

It is hard to ensure
that all students will take an online test simultaneously, enabling students
to supply questions and answers to those who take the test later.

-- Unfair retaking of
assessments

While course
management system servers can be configured to prevent taking a test multiple
times, there can be ways to work around prevention measures.

-- Unauthorized help
during the assessment

It may not be
possible to confirm the identity of the person actually taking the online
test.

The Online Journal of
Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published
by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West
Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html.

SOCIAL INTERACTION IN
ONLINE LEARNING

Among the reasons
Rowe cites (in the aforementioned paper) for cheating on online tests is that
"students often have less commitment to the integrity of
distance-learning programs than traditional programs." This lack of
commitment may be the result of the isolation inherent in distance education.
In "Online Learning: Social Interaction and the Creation of a Sense of
Community" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 7, no. 3, July
2004, pp. 73-81), Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, Central Queensland
University, argue that an online learner's feeling a sense of isolation can
affect the outcome of his or her learning experience. The authors recommend
three protocols to aid social interaction and alleviate isolation among online
learners:

1. The use of
synchronous communication

"Chat-rooms and
other such forums are an excellent way for students to socialize, to assist
each other with study, or to learn as part of collaborative teams."

2. The introduction
of a forming stage

"Discussion on
almost any topics (the latest movies, sporting results,

etc.) can be utilized
by the educator as a prelude to the building of trust and community that is
essential to any successful online experience."

3. The adherence to
effective communication guidelines "Foremost among these guidelines is
the need for unambiguous instructions and communications from the educator to
the students involved in the course. To this end instructions regarding both
course requirements and communication protocols should be placed on the course
web site."

Educational
Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online
journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology &
Society and the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF).
It is available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/.

The International
Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) is a subgroup of the
IEEE Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). IFETS encourages discussions on
the issues affecting the educational system developer (including AI) and
education communities. For more information, link to http://ifets.ieee.org/.

Two articles in the
July/August 2005 issue of SYLLABUS address the often-asked questions on
delivering online instruction: "How much will it cost?" and
"How many students can we have in a class?"

In "Online
Course Development: What Does It Cost?" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12,
July/August 2004, pp. 27-30) Judith V. Boettcher looks at where the costs of
online course development have shifted in the past ten years. While the costs
of course development are still significant, estimating them is not an exact
science. Boettcher, however, does provide some rules of thumb that program
planners can use to get more accurate estimates. The article is available
online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9676.

In "Online
Course Caps: A Survey" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp.
43-4) Boris Vilic reports on a survey of 101 institutions to determine their
average course cap for online courses. The survey also tried to determine what
influences differences in setting caps: Does the delivery method used make a
difference? Are there differences if the course is taught by full-time faculty
or by adjuncts? Or if given by experienced versus inexperienced providers? Or
by the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the course? The article is
available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9679.

Syllabus [ISSN
1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale
Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax:
650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/.
Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges,
universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/
for more information.

One student has
been expelled, and more than 100 cases of plagiarism remain to be resolved
at the University of Virginia after a physics professor used a computer
program to catch students who turned in duplicate papers, or portions of
papers that appeared to have been copied.

The school's
student-run Honor Committee spent the summer investigating a fraction of the
cases, and will continue to do so through the fall semester.

The committee's
work has been slow over the summer break since many students are away.
Thomas Hall, chairman of the committee, said he hopes to complete the
remaining investigations by the end of October, and finish the trials by the
end of the fall semester

Dartmouth College has accused 64 students of
cheating in a “Sports, Ethics, and Religion” course taught last fall, the Valley
Newsreports. Randall
Balmer, chairman of the religion department, discovered in October that
absent students in his class were passing their clickers to classmates who
were present to answer in-class questions on their behalf.

Mr. Balmer told the newspaper that most of the
students involved had been suspended for a semester. In the fall he counted
43 students who handed off their clickers in the roughly 275-person class,
but that number does not include the students who facilitated the cheating.

The popular class was initially designed to help
the college’s athletes, many of whom struggled with freshman-year
coursework.

Diana Lawrence, a spokeswoman for the college, said
it would not offer more-detailed comment on the proceedings until the
appeals process ends this month.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
It would be interesting to know the grading distribution in this course. My
hypothesis is that students are more apt to skip class and cheat in a course
where they are assured of an A grade with very little effort. This is what
happened when over 120 students cheated in a political science course assignment
at Harvard University. All students in that course were assured of getting A
grades such that there's less incentive to work hard in the course. In Harvard's
case over half the cheaters were expelled from the University. It appears that
Dartmouth College will be a little less harsh.

Harvard University is investigating about 125 students
-- nearly 2 percent of all undergraduates -- who are suspected of cheating
on a take-home final during the spring semester,
The Boston Globereported Thursday. The
students will appear before the college’s disciplinary board over the coming
weeks, seem to have copied each other’s work, the dean of undergraduate
education said. Those found guilty could face up to a one-year suspension.
The dean would not comment on whether students who had already graduated
would have their degrees revoked but he did tell the Globe, “this
is something we take really, really seriously.” Harvard administrators said
they are considering new ways to educate students about cheating and
academic ethics. While the university has no honor code, the Globe
noted, its official handbook says students should “assume that collaboration
in the completion of assignments is prohibited unless explicitly permitted
by the instructor.”

In years past, the course, Introduction to
Congress, had a reputation as one of the easiest at Harvard College. Some of
the 279 students who took it in the spring semester said that the teacher,
Matthew B. Platt, an assistant professor of government, told them at the
outset that he gave high grades and that neither attending his lectures nor
the discussion sessions with graduate teaching fellows was mandatory.

¶ But evaluations posted online by students after
finals — before the cheating charges were made — in Harvard’s Q Guide were
filled with seething assessments, and made clear that the class was no
longer easy. Many students, who posted anonymously, described Dr. Platt as a
great lecturer, but the guide included far more comments like “I felt that
many of the exam questions were designed to trick you rather than test your
understanding of the material,” “the exams are absolutely absurd and don’t
match the material covered in the lecture at all,” “went from being easy
last year to just being plain old confusing,” and “this was perhaps the
worst class I have ever taken.”

¶ Harvard University revealed on Wednesday that
nearly half of the undergraduates in the spring class were under
investigation for suspected cheating, for working together or for
plagiarizing on a take-home final exam. Jay Harris, the dean of
undergraduate education, called the episode “unprecedented in its scope and
magnitude.”

¶ The university would not name the class, but it
was identified by students facing cheating allegations. They were granted
anonymity because they said they feared that open criticism could influence
the outcome of their disciplinary cases.

¶ “They’re threatening people’s futures,” said a
student who graduated in May. “Having my degree revoked now would mean I
lose my job.”

¶ The students said they do not doubt that some
people in the class did things that were obviously prohibited, like working
together in writing test answers. But they said that some of the conduct now
being condemned was taken for granted in the course, on previous tests and
in previous years.

¶ Dr. Platt and his teaching assistants did not
respond to messages requesting comment that were left on Friday. In response
to calls to Mr. Harris and Michael D. Smith, the dean and chief academic
officer of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university released a
statement saying that the university’s administrative board still must meet
with each accused student and that it has not reached any conclusions.

¶ “We expect to learn more about the way the course
was organized and how work was approached in class and on the take-home
final,” the statement said. “That is the type of information that the
process is designed to bring forward, and we will review all of the facts as
they arise.”

¶ The class met three times a week, and each
student in the class was assigned to one of 10 discussion sections, each of
which held weekly sessions with graduate teaching fellows. The course grade
was based entirely on four take-home tests, which students had several days
to complete and which were graded by the teaching fellows.

¶ Students complained that teaching fellows varied
widely in how tough they were in grading, how helpful they were, and which
terms and references to sources they expected to see in answers. As a
result, they said, students routinely shared notes from Dr. Pratt’s
lectures, notes from discussion sessions, and reading materials, which they
believed was allowed.

¶ “I was just someone who shared notes, and now I’m
implicated in this,” said a senior who faces a cheating allegation.
“Everyone in this class had shared notes. You’d expect similar answers.”

¶ Instructions on the final exam said, “students
may not discuss the exam with others.” Students said that consulting with
the fellows on exams was commonplace, that the fellows generally did not
turn students away, and that the fellows did not always understand the
questions, either.

¶ One student recalled going to a teaching fellow
while working on the final exam and finding a crowd of others there, asking
about a test question that hinged on an unfamiliar term. The student said
the fellow defined the term for them.

¶ An accused sophomore said that in working on
exams, “everybody went to the T.F.’s and begged for help. Some of the T.F.’s
really laid it out for you, as explicit as you need, so of course the
answers were the same.”

¶ He said that he also discussed test questions
with other students, which he acknowledged was prohibited, but he maintained
that the practice was widespread and accepted.

As many as 60 students have been forced to withdraw
from Harvard University after cheating on a final exam last year in what has
become the largest academic scandal to hit the Ivy League school in recent
memory.

Michael Smith, Harvard's Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences, sent an email on Friday saying that more than half of the
students who faced the school's Administrative Board have been suspended for
a time.

Roughly 125 undergraduates were involved in the
scandal, which came to light at the end of the spring semester after a
professor noticed similarities on a take-home exam that showed students
worked together, even though they were instructed to work alone.

The school's student newspaper, The Harvard
Crimson, has reported that the government class, Introduction to Congress,
had 279 students enrolled.

"Somewhat more than half of the Administrative
Board cases this past fall required a student to withdraw from the College
for a period of time," Smith wrote. "Of the remaining cases, roughly half
the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance ended in no
disciplinary action."

The cases were resolved during the fall semester,
which ended in December, Smith said. Suspensions depend on the student, but
traditionally last two semesters and as much as four semesters.

In the last few months, the university has also
worked to be clearer about the academic integrity it expects from students.

"While all the fall cases are complete, our work on
academic integrity is far from done," Smith added.

In an apparent disclosure about the Harvard
cheating scandal, a top university official said Friday that more than half
of the Harvard students investigated by a college board have been ordered to
withdraw from the school.

In an e-mail to the Harvard community, Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith wrote that more than half of
the students who were brought before the university's Administration Board
this fall were required to withdraw from for a period of time.

Of the remaining cases, approximately half the
students received disciplinary probation, while the rest of the cases were
dismissed.

Smith's e-mail does not explicitly address the
cheating scandal that implicated about 125 Harvard students. But a Harvard
official confirmed Friday that the cases in the email solely referred to one
course.

In August, Harvard disclosed the cheating scandal
in a Spring 2012 class. It was widely reported to be "Government 1310:
Introduction to Congress."

“Consistent with the Faculty’s rules and our
obligations to our students, we do not report individual outcomes of
Administrative Board cases, but only report aggregate statistics,” the
e-mail said. "In that tradition, the College reports that somewhat more than
half of the Administrative Board cases this past fall required a student to
withdraw from the College for a period of time. Of the remaining cases,
roughly half the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance
ended in no disciplinary action.''

Smith wrote that the first set of cases were
decided in late September, and the remainder were resolved in December.

The e-mail said that "The time span of the
resolutions in this set had an undesirable interaction with our established
schedule for tuition refunds. To create a greater amount of financial equity
for all students who ultimately withdrew sometime in this period, we are
treating, for the purpose of calculating tuition refunds, all these students
as having received a requirement to withdraw on September 30, 2012."

In a statement released when the cheating scandal
became public, Harvard president Drew Faust said that the allegations, “if
proven, represent totally unacceptable behavior that betrays the trust upon
which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends. . . . There is work to be
done to ensure that every student at Harvard understands and embraces the
values that are fundamental to its community of scholars.”

As Harvard students returned to classes for the
current semester, professsors included explicit instructions about
collaboration on the class syllabus.

On campus Friday afternoon, students reacted to the
news.

Michael Constant, 19, said he thinks the college
wanted to make a statement with its decision. But when over half of the
students in a class cheat, not punishing them is the same as condoning the
behavior.

“I think it’s fair,” Constant said of the board’s
disciplinary action. “They made the choice to cheat.”

Georgina Parfitt, 22, said the punishment for these
students was too harsh, and that many students in the class could have been
confused about the policy.

Parfitt said she does not know what the college is
trying to achieve by forcing students to leave.

Continued in article

Jensen Question
The question is why cheat at Harvard since almost everybody who tries in a
Harvard course receives an A. We're left with the feeling that those 125 or so
students who cheated just did not want to try?

"Duke MBAs Fail Ethics: Test Thirty-four Fuqua School of
Business students are accused of violating the school's honor
code by cheating on an exam," by Alison Damast,
Business Week, April 30, 2007 ---
Click Here

Cheating on the Rise

Business-school leaders have reason
to be concerned. Fifty-six percent of graduate business
students admitted to cheating one or more times in the past
academic year, compared to 47% of nonbusiness students,
according to a study published in September in the journal
of the Academy of Management Learning & Education
(see BusinessWeek.com, 10/24/06,
"A Crooked Path Through B-School").
Donald McCabe, the lead author of the
study and a professor of management and global business at
Rutgers Business School, says the
large number of students implicated in the Duke case is
above average. "It's certainly not the biggest, but it's one
of the bigger ones," he says of academic scandals involving
all kinds of students.

One of the larger cases in the past
five years was a cheating scandal in a physics class at the
University of Virginia in 2002. The school eventually
dismissed 45 students and revoked three graduates' degrees.
In 2005, Harvard Business School rejected 119 applicants
accused of hacking the school's admissions Web site (see
BusinessWeek.com, 3/9/05,
"An Ethics Lesson for MBA Wannabes").

The Duke occurrence came to light
in mid-March, when the professor for the class noticed some
unusual consistencies among students' answers on the final
exam and as well as on assignments given during the course.

Stiff Penalties

The students were brought before
the school's Judicial Board and are facing a range of wide
range of punitive measures, including expulsion. The board
is made up of three faculty members, three students, and one
nonvoting faculty chair who only votes in case of a tie.

Thirty-eight students were
initially investigated, only four of whom were found not
guilty of violating the honor code. (Of the 38 students, 37
were accused of cheating and one of lying.) Of the remaining
34 students, 9 will be expelled, 15 will be suspended for
one year and receive an F in the class, and the remaining 9
will receive an F in the course. The penalties for the
students will not go into effect until June 1, after which
students will have 15 days to file an appeal. The school did
not release the names of the students involved or name the
professor.

Gavan Fitzsimons, a
professor who is chair of the Fuqua Honor
Committee, said in a written summary of the
board hearings that the board spent several
weeks "deliberating at length" the
circumstances of the case. "It is my utmost
hope that all of the individuals found
guilty of violating our Honor Code will
learn how precious a gift honor and
integrity is," he wrote. "I know from my
interactions with many of them that they
will forever be changed by this experience."

Academic Pressures

The faculty and
student body at Duke were informed of the
committee's decision on the afternoon of
Apr. 27, and the news spread throughout the
campus and on Internet chat groups. Charles
Scrase, Fuqua's student body president, was
surprised by the charges: "The classmates I
work with on a day-to-day basis are ethical,
outstanding individuals," he says. "We're
shocked that [cheating] could've occurred to
this degree."

Sonit Handa, a
first-year Fuqua student, suggests the
students involved in this case might have
been tempted to cheat because they wanted to
ensure they did well in the class: "Duke is
a hectic MBA business school, and employers
want good grades, so there's a lot of
pressure to do well."

The pressure, of
course, is not confined to Duke. Many
schools have policies that encourage an open
dialogue on business ethics. Students at the
Thunderbird School of Global Managementsign a Professional
Oath of Honor similar to doctors'
Hippocratic Oath, while
Penn State created
an honor committee of students and faculty
last year to help foster academic integrity
on campus.

Codes Not
Foolproof

One of the more
recent examples is the new graduate honor
court at the University of North Carolina's
Kenan-Flagler Business School.
In January, the
business school established a student-run
honor court, a body devoted to investigating
student violations of the honor code.
Between 30 and 40 students, from the
school's five MBA programs, are involved
with the court, according to Dawn Morrow, a
second-year MBA student who serves as the
student attorney general for the court.

Before this,
student honor code violations were dealt
with through the graduate honor court
system, which handled cases from other
graduate programs. Morrow says that students
have been eager to get involved with the
honor court because they want to ensure that
the school's values are upheld inside and
outside the classroom. Rutgers' McCabe
estimates that 50 to 100 colleges and
universities have honor codes.

Schools with
extensive honor codes, such as Duke, tend to
have less cheating in general, McCabe says.
Still, he says, it's not a foolproof
measure. Business-school students are more
competitive than other students, and some
use cheating as a way to ensure they get
ahead: "It's kind of like a businessperson
who has the opportunity to embezzle money in
the dark of night," says McCabe. "Sure it's
more tempting, but we still expect them to
be honest."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There are two broad types of student honor codes. The toughest one is where each
student signs an oath to report the cheating of any other student. This is a
rough code that, in my opinion, must be backed by a college commitment to back
the whistle blowing student if litigation ensues in the very litigious society
of the United States (where 80% of the world's lawyers reside.)

The second kind is a softer version where students are not honor bound to
report cheating by run their own honor courts to dole out punishment
recommendations for cheating reported by others, usually their instructors. This
may actually result in harsher punishments than instructors would normally dole
out. For example, professors often think an F grade is sufficient punishment.
Honor courts may recommend more severe punishments such as in the Duke scandal
noted above.

One problem with honor courts is that they are more of a hassle for
instructors having to take the time to report details of the infraction to the
court and then appear before the court as witnesses. An even more controversial
problem is that the inherent right of an instructor to assign a course grade
punishment for cheating is taken out of the hands of the instructor and passed
on to the honor court. Instructors generally do not like to lose their authority
and responsibility for assigning grades.

Update on May 22, 2008Duke University Invites Back Business Students Who Cheated

I used to think poorly of
Duke MBAs. As a UNC recruit, one of my fondest memories was Welcome Weekend,
where all admitted students are invited to meet each other and figure out
whether Kenan-Flagler is right for them. While attending, I wanted to see
how advanced I was at the fine art of diagnosing who would be ill enough to
choose Fuqua over Kenan-Flagler.

My first suspected victim
used to be an engineer, had a GMAT of 770, and got into seven different
schools. When asked about his interest in North Carolina, he said, "Oh the
weather. It’s so nice," and then proceeded to sweat, nervously tic, and
stare intently at me, playing the crack addict to my crack. Clearly he
suffered from Fuquash: the inability to relate to humans.

Others were afflicted with
Fuquardation, or arrogance and entitlement falling just short of Whartonitis.
This could be diagnosed by simply asking them, "What do you do for a
living?" Infected parties came just short of an elaborate PowerPoint
presentation-style pitch followed by a monopolization of group conversation
revolving around their pet horse and its food likes and dislikes.

Now, it turns out that these
people did not go to Kenan-Flagler, but they also haven’t been among the
numerous upstanding and well-balanced people I’ve met from Fuqua. Concern
has been voiced over Duke MBA ethics; I heartily disagree. According to a
recent survey, 56% of MBAs cheat, yet somehow Fuqua is the only MBA program
that can catch them and then admit to it! To me, that seems more like an
accomplishment and less like a scandal, and I hope you don’t fault them for
it in your search.

At business school you learn
to look at both sides of complicated situations, and accordingly in this
post I’d like to share my positive and negative thoughts on the MBA as a
whole, and the Kenan-Flagler experience in particular.

The MBA: Invaluable

My ability to manage time
and stress has skyrocketed, and overall I think through problems in a
broader and more insightful fashion. A lot of my gut instincts on management
and decision-making have been reinforced, while compelling evidence has been
provided through 360-degree feedback and interactive course work that other
habits need to go.

As for the career benefits,
I’ve seen English teachers turn into financiers in 12 weeks. The MBA is
worth every penny to career-switchers and adds incredible value to folks who
don’t have strong business backgrounds. Just as important, the size of my
professional network quadrupled overnight and continues to grow daily.

The MBA: Dinosaur

MBA programs give you
credibility, new skills, and a great network, but there are plenty of ways
they could go about it better.

Most classes in most
programs revolve around lecture and case studies; this is not going to
continue to fly for the MTV generation. I fully understand how teachers feel
that asking questions and discussing a shared case is interactive, but they
clearly haven’t grown up in the highly immersive multimedia world that most
echo boomers come from. Integrating real-time simulation into the classroom
as well as experimenting with group participation could favorably affect
learning.

Furthermore, the core
economic principles that most programs teach come from a microeconomic and
macroeconomic world where people are rational, systems are closed, and
equilibrium is always reached. Considering how irrational people are and how
open and dynamic our economy is, I can’t help but think we’re getting led
astray, and books like The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker go a long way
to confirming this fear.

Finally, I think programs
create overload for overload’s sake while at the same time coddling
students. MBAs run around like frantic idiots but are courted by huge
companies as rock stars. It is no surprise that this combination of frenzy
and entitlement leads to cheating. I think a less insular environment that
is more integrated with the real world and local community would help
students stay focused and balanced, making them less likely to make poor
decisions.

Want to know
where business students are cheating? Many schools have
honor codes, but it's not easy to find out when they're
broken.

With the controversy
surrounding the cheating scandal at Duke
University's
Fuqua School of Business,
a prospective business school student might
be inclined to take a closer look at just
how often cheating occurs at some top
B-schools. But if you're of that mind, be
prepared to encounter some roadblocks along
the way.

This was what happened
when BusinessWeek conducted an
e-mail survey of our
top 25ranked
graduate business schools in an effort to
quantify how widespread cheating is among
B-school students. It turned out to be a
tougher task than we expected. We learned
that business schools are reluctant to
release data about cheating and, in some
cases, refuse even to discuss it.

Back in May—shortly after Duke announced it
was disciplining 34 students for ethical
violations involving a test and classwork—we
asked each of the top 25 how many students
had been sanctioned for cheating or other
ethical violations over the past 10 years.
We requested a breakdown by school year,
type of violation committed, and punishment
handed down, if any. We also asked the
school if they had an honor code and, if so,
what their process was for dealing with
students who violated it.

Handful of Cases Only

Out of the 25 business
schools, only three—the
University of Virginia,
Duke, and the
University of Chicago—were
able to provide us with specific data about
ethical violations among their B-school
students. Fifteen schools provided us with
information about their policy for dealing
with ethics violations, but did not provide
specific figures on cheating. And seven
schools declined to provide any information
(see BusinessWeek.com, 6/21/07,
"Schools' Responses on Cheating Stats").

From the limited amount of information
provided by the schools, there was no
indication that cheating cases resulting in
school disciplinary action were numerous at
top B-schools. Chicago, for instance, said
that it only had 25 disciplinary hearings
over the past 13 years. All 25 resulted in
sanctions, although only 11 were related to
academic issues or misconduct. That's an
average of less than one academic sanction
per year during that period.

Schools such as
New York Universityand Indiana
University's
Kelly School of Businesssaid they just have a
"handful" of cases each year, but declined
to get more specific on the figures. And
Virginia has had just a small number of
cases in the past seven years that resulted
in expulsions, according to online records
kept by the school's honor committee.

Playing With Cheaters

Still, the unwillingness of a large number
of top schools to provide data on cheating
is bad news for a business school student
who wants to get an accurate picture of how
his classmates might conduct themselves
while in school, said David Callahan, author
of The Cheating Culture: Why More
Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.

"It seems to me like it is a piece of
information you would want to know about the
business school you are going to," Callahan
said. "If you are an honest student, it puts
you at a disadvantage to be in an
environment with cheating because you're
going to be working harder and losing out to
people who are not playing by the rules."

Administrators at business schools offered a
wide variety of reasons they were unable to
disclose data on cheating; some said they
simply didn't keep track of it, while others
said they could not disclose it because of
federal privacy laws. A handful said simply
that cheating rarely, if ever, happens at
their school.

Continued in article

D-Schools Are Also CheatingThe Southern Illinois University dental school, which
is affiliated with the Edwardsville campus, is withholding grades of all
first-year students, because of questions raised about the academic merit and
integrity of the students. A university spokesman declined to provide details,
citing the need to preserve confidentiality and the presumption of innocence,
but said that all 52 first-year students would be interviewed as part of the
inquiry. Ann Boyle, dean of the dental school, issued a statement: “This matter
raises questions about the integrity and ethical behavior of Year I students and
is, therefore, under investigation. We will follow our processes as outlined in
our Student Progress Document to resolve the situation as quickly as we can.”
KMOV-TV quoted students at the dental school,
anonymously, as saying that the investigation concerned students who had tried
to memorize and share information from old exams that instructors let them see,
so the students did not consider the practice to be cheating. The Southern
Illinois incident follows two other scandals this year involving
professional school cheating:one at Duke
University’s business school and one at Indiana University’s dental school.
Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/27/qt

Dental School Alleged Cheating at Loma Linda University, New York
University, and UCLAThe American Dental Association is investigating
allegations of possible cheating by students at four dental schools on an exam
that leads to licensure for dentists, theLos Angeles Timesreported. The probe
involves students at Loma Linda University, New York University, the University
of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. Inside Higher Ed, November 14, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/14/qt

Plagiarism NewsAn investigative committee is pushing for the
dismissal of Don Heinrich Tolzmann, who teaches history and works as a librarian
at the University of Cincinnati,
The Enquirer reported. A panel there found
duplications between Tolzmann’s book The German-American Experience and a text
written in 1962. Tolzmann strongly denies wrongdoing, which was first alleged in
an
H-Net review.At Ohio University, which has been
dealing with charges of plagiarized master’s theses, the institution announced
that graduates accused of plagiarism would face hearings to determine the status
of their degrees, the
Associated Pressreported.Inside Higher Ed, August 25, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/24/qt

Question
Will these engineering graduates take down their diplomas and return them to
Ohio University?

A Professor's Lawsuit Against Ohio UniversityJay Gunasekera, a professor who supervised the work of
some of the 37 Ohio University master’s graduates found to have plagiarized
parts of their theses, is suing the university for defamation, saying that his
role has been distorted, the Associated Press
reported. University officials — who
have released detailed reportson the alleged
plagiarism — told the AP that they would contest the suit.Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/14/qt

Question
What happens when professors who let students cheat get caught themselves?

Fallout continues from a plagiarism saga at Ohio
University that has clouded the reputation of the university’s engineering
college. Earlier this month, Roderick J. McDavis, Ohio’s president, for the
first time in the institution’s history rescinded the title of
“distinguished professor,” a high academic honor that had been given to
engineering professor Jay S. Gunasekera years earlier for his research,
teaching and service.

Gunasekera is
at the center of the controversy, the subject of charges
that he both plagiarized a graduate student’s work in a
published book, and failed to adequately monitor graduate
students who went on to copy others’ material in theses they
submitted under his watch.

What
began in 2005 as a former engineering graduate student’s
effort to show dishonesty among
his colleagues has ballooned into a university-wide
investigation. A
review by two universityofficials
found “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” by graduate students
in the mechanical engineering department, as well as a
“failure to monitor” those students.

Gunasekera
didn’t respond to messages for comment Thursday. He is suing
the university for defamation and has said the report
misstates his role.

Several other committees have looked into the work of
students, many of whom Gunasekera advised. Already, Ohio has
revoked the master’s degreeof a
former mechanical engineering student whose thesis it
determined contained unoriginal work.

Gunasekera
was chair of the department at the time the allegations
surfaced. He was removed from that position, and also had a
named professorship taken away. This year, he’s on
assignment and not teaching or advising students.

In November,
a panel of fellow “distinguished professors” who looked at
Gunasekera’s work and that of some of his students, voted to
recommend that the university remove “distinguished” from
his title.

“It’s
supposed to be an honor for people whose records have
brought acclaim to the university and to themselves,” said
Steven Grimes, a distinguished professor of physics and
astronomy, who chaired the committee and voted to rescind
the title. “He clearly had done that, but obviously now it
doesn’t look like he’s helping the reputation of the
university.”

David
Drabold, a distinguished professor of physics, who voted in
favor of removing the title, said he was surprised that the
decision took as long as it did. “I think the case was
fairly clear,” Drabold said, adding that he was swayed by
the examples of unoriginal work from theses that were
approved by Gunasekera.

Those who
have heard Gunasekera’s defense to the plagiarism charges
say the professor argues that as an international professor
(he taught in Australia and Sri Lanka) he didn’t understand
the prevailing American citation standards.

Drabold said
he can understand how that could have been the case
initially — Gunasekera joined the Ohio faculty in 1983. He
even said the professor made an attempt in the preface of
the book in question to credit the graduate student whose
material he used.

But, as
Drabold and others on the distinguished faculty committee
note, his defense wouldn’t explain why he allowed his
graduate students to routinely copy others for years after
he started at Ohio.

Said Gar
Rothwell, a distinguished professor of environmental and
plant biology: “There are standards of scholarship that we
all have to follow. They aren’t secret.”

Greg Kremer,
chair of the mechanical engineering department and an
associate professor, said while he didn’t feel comfortable
commenting on what Gunasekera’s future at Ohio should be, he
offered that “the level of proof and the level of
seriousness it takes to remove a distinguished professor
title is very, very significantly different than anything
that would result in the de-tenuring process.”

Kremer said
the department is waiting for the university-wide
investigation of student theses to finish before it decides
whether to take action.

Several of
the distinguished professors interviewed referred to
Gunasekera as affable and successful in parts of his
professional life — saying he brought in significant
external funding for engineering and technology projects.

“This is a
decent man who has been through a lot of unpleasantness,”
Drabold said. “This was an active, productive person. He was
trying to be a good citizen and was simply doing too much.”

Grimes
agrees that Gunasekera likely didn’t have bad intentions,
and that “it’s not at all obvious to me that what he did
rises to the level of firing.” Yet he said that he’d still
“seriously consider” voting for de-tenure.

Eight University of
Virginia students have left school for plagiarism, and a student committee is
preparing to investigate 72 more alleged honor code violations in what has
become the school's biggest cheating scandal in memory.

Since May, 148
students have been accused of copying term papers in Professor Lou
Bloomfield's introductory physics course. Bloomfield referred the students to
the university honor committee after a homemade computer program detected
numerous duplicated phrases in his students' work during the past five
semesters.

"That was a real
shock," said Thomas Hall, chairman of the honor committee, whose staff
has been under enormous pressure to finish its investigation before graduation
this May. "The largest number of accusations I'd seen from any one
professor was maybe five."

Here are some of the
highlights I noted while watching Mike Wallace's update last night

Question:How many students have been expelled from the University of Virginia over the
approximate period of one year and how many are still awaiting a decision on
whether or not they will be expelled due to Honor Code violations at the
University of Virginia?

Answer:
The number is now up to 40 students expelled with 120 others still awaiting a
decision as to their fate. I might note that this is after the scandal
made national headlines almost a year ago when eight students were expelled.

Question:
What is the most absurd claim made by a UVA student interviewed on campus by
Mike Wallace?

Answer:
That faculty investigations of honor code violations are violations of trust
that students have in faculty when students sign the honor code.
Students are led to believe that faculty will not snoop into cheating even if
there is evidence of such cheating.

Question:
What is the most innovative way students are cheating in examinations using
water bottles?

Question:
What is an earlier CBS 48 Hours show in which the School Board of a high
school overturned the grades of a biology teacher who failed students for
cheating by downloading their main project papers from the Internet?

It all started with
a 10th grade biology project about leaves. But the dust-up over the handling
of a student-plagiarism incident in the normally tranquil Kansas City, Kan.,
suburb of Piper doesn't appear likely to subside any time soon.

So far, the teacher
at the center of the controversy, Christine Pelton, has resigned. Another
teacher resigned last month in support, and several others are contemplating
whether they want to stay with the 1,300-student district. The latest
casualty is Michael Adams, the principal at the 450- student Piper High
School, who announced last month that he would resign at the end of the
school year. He cited "personal and professional" reasons, but
added in an interview: "You can read between the lines."

In addition, the
district attorney has filed civil charges against the district's
seven-member school board, accusing the members of violating the Kansas
open-meetings law last December when they reduced the penalties for the 28
students accused of plagiarism. And three board members now face a recall
drive.

"All of us
have gotten tons of hate mail, from all over the country," said Leigh
Vader, the Piper school board's vice president. "People are telling us
we're idiots and stupid. ... Moving on—I think that's the goal of
everyone."

But that may be
difficult. The dispute, which has drawn national attention, will return to
the national spotlight in May, when the CBS newsmagazine "48
Hours" is expected to air an investigative report on the Piper
plagiarism case.

"For a lot of
people," said David Lungren, the president of the Piper Teachers
Association, "the feeling is we can debate the decision to death or
figure out what we need to do to move on. If we can all agree that this did
not work out well for us, what could we figure out to prevent this from
occurring again?"

Question:
What is the major conclusion drawn by commentators of on all of these CBS shows
about cheating?

Answer:
That a rapidly-growing proportion students no longer consider cheating a bad
thing to do as long as you don't get caught. And their parents do not
consider cheating a bad thing and will even go to school officials and even
court to defend against punishments for cheating.

"Cambridge Survey
Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized,"
by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3,
2008 ---
Click Here

Half the students at the University of Cambridge
have plagiarized, according to results of a survey byVarsity,a student newspaper at the university.

The newspaper said its survey had attracted 1,014
respondents, of whom 49 percent said they had committed at least one act
defined by the university as plagiarism. The list of forbidden acts
included: handing in someone else’s essay; copying and pasting from the
Internet; copying or making up statistics, code, or research results;
handing in work that had been submitted previously; using someone else’s
ideas without acknowledgment; buying an essay; and having an essay edited byOxbridge Essays,a company that provides online essay services. Five
percent of those who admitted having plagiarized said they had been caught.

Some students were surprised to find that what they
thought were innocuous academic acts had landed them in the plagiarist
category. “Of course I use other people’s ideas without acknowledging them,
but I didn’t think that this made me a plagiarist,” one student said.

But others admitted copying or buying work “when I
am late with an essay or finding it difficult.” Law students, the newspaper
said, broke the rules most often, with 62 percent admitting that they had
plagiarized. Four percent of students surveyed said they had written for
Oxbridge Essays.

Comments

Yes, and 100% of civil rights leaders named Martin
Luther King, Jr., have also plagiarized. And 100% of writers named Doris
Kearns Goodwin have plagiarized. And 100% of vice-presidential candidates
named Joe Biden have plagiarized. These students are in good company. Maybe
we should educate them rather than haul them before a firing squad, as too
many professors want to do.

— gl Nov 1, 08:22 PM #

I agree with gl, it seems a bit harsh to haul
anyone anywhere, much less before a firing squad, until we have delved into
the depth of the training students receive about the rigors of attribution.
(Hint: scandalously little)

The internet with all its advances did bomb us back
to the intellectual property stone age with the conspicuous absence of paper
trails for the materials one can find within a click or two of beginning
research.

The other part of the problem, and I am ready to be
placed before the firing squad for this comment, professors (especially at
the undergraduate level) do not put enough thinking into the construction of
their essay questions. And to make matters worse, they use the same old
tired questions year in decade out. So let’s look at our role in
perpetuating this obnoxious problem and criminal waste of time on both
sides.

Newsflash, profs! Life is short. Why spend your
precious discretionary time playing cops and robbers with your students?

— BC PROF Nov 1, 11:42 PM #

Using a service like Turnitin.com helps to reduce
plagiarism quite a bit because even if the students don’t have a high
likelihood of getting caught, they know that they are really taking a big
risk if they try to fool the system. If students know there’s a good chance
they’ll get caught, they will not engage in plagiarism. Some professors
would rather spend their leisure time with their families or doing their own
research rather than chasing down sources of plagiarism. Use the tools to
help you catch cheaters so you can have more time for your own life.

— MEH Nov 2, 02:16 PM #

Of course if I discover that a student has
committed plagiarism, I take the steps that are prescribed by the honor code
at my university. But I did not become a teacher to spend my time enforcing
such codes. If a student cheats and receives a grade that he doesn’t
deserve, he is the poorer for it. We have this idea that cheaters are
robbing someone else of something valuable, and therefore that we ought to
act to stop them or to punish them. It is not so difficult to see that
plagiarists are only cheating themselves. They pay the very high price of
not learning what they might have learned under their own lights, and to my
mind that is penalty enough.

— SK Nov 2, 02:49 PM #

MEH, the time you save with turnitin.com is lost
when you catch a cheater, because you yourself become a cheater if you don’t
report the honor violation (rather than handle it privately, which most
campuses frown upon). So assuming you’re as honest as you expect your
student to be, you’re sucked into the whole lengthy honors process, with
forms and hearings and meetings and eventually the wish that you had not
been so persnickety.

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written. Or, as I do, require first drafts of nearly
completed works, a couple weeks before the real due date, with which you can
issue warnings framed in face-saving
look-what-you-forgot-you-cite-or-enclose-in-quotation-marks language. They
get the message you’re tough, especially if you threaten reporting an honors
violation if the supposed error is not corrected, and you spend even more
time with your own life.

— gl Nov 2, 03:04 PM #

gl

I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written.

right, I am sure that is feasible in history of
philosophy classes. Second Idea was much more reasonable.

— jon Nov 2, 08:54 PM #

The key is what the students perceive as cheating.
If using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it is cheating, then we
are all cheaters. The kids come in to college 17 years old and dumb. They
sit in lectures, read books, talk to classmates and faculty, and hear all
kinds of new ideas. How can they ever acknowledge where all those ideas came
from? How can they even remember when the ideas were first planted and by
whom?

Similarly, good writing involves sharing ideas with
other students, revising and proofreading. That violates the honor code
standard of “doing your own work.” We create a catch-22 when we demand high
quality work but strictly prohibit some of the methods that are essential
for good learning. And even if we don’t “strictly” prohibit appropriate
collaboration, not all students know where the line is. Consequently, some
students will identify themselves as cheaters, even though the type of help
they get on their assignments is acceptable.

And in my field, it is pretty common for students
to forget to write down some detail of their source information, and at the
last minute have to fudge the works cited. Technically it is fabrication,
and the students know it. It would be embarrassing to publish a error-filled
works cited. But in the end it is too trivial to worry about.

All these kinds of cases drive up the number of
self-identified cheaters. It isn’t worth faculty worrying out.

— Shar Nov 3, 12:33 AM #

As others have noted, the extensive use of
plagiarism requires an educational solution. I commend to you an excellent
article by Eleanour Snow who describes (and links to) a number of
institution-wide web tutorials designed to teach students about plagiarism.
You can view the article at http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=306&action=article
(requires free subscription).

James L. Morrison Editor-in-Chief, Innovate

Jensen Comment
There's serious doubt that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis.

It's not clear that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesisLarge parts of an economics thesis written by President
Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management
textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday,
citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however,
whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to
impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the
mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations
at the time.
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 ---
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html
Jensen Comment
What's interesting about this news item is that it was published in Moscow. This
would not have happened in the old Soviet Union.

Having taught accounting at Cambridge for several
years, I believe that these high plagiarism figures are of no relevance to
any accounting courses taught there.

I would guess that the high figures are likely due
to the unique college tutorial system at Cambridge University (along with
Oxford and a few others) where undergraduate students attend frequent
(usually biweekly) small group tutorials in addition to lectures. Students
are often required to write essays for these tutorials under very tight time
constraints. The high plagiarism figures are likely driven by undergraduates
trying to finish essays by these deadlines. The students don't benefit from
such cheating. Although the essays are marked they do not count towards a
final grade, and any under-prepared students are usually exposed as such in
the tutorials. [For accounting tutorials, essays are very rarely set, and
instead students are required to work through a previously unseen question.]

Paul Guest
Cranfield School of Management

Then in a second message Paul wrote the following:

I agree, cheating students won't learn much about
the assigned material if they cheat. However, under the Cambridge and Oxford
(tutorial & written assignment) system (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system , cheating
students are much more likely to be caught at an early stage when the
consequences are much less severe (since written assignments do not
contribute to final grades). The cheating can therefore be dealt with
informally and with a light touch by a tutor who is close to the student, so
lessons can be learned with no lasting damage. Especially important when
many cases of plagiarism appear to arise from ignorance.

Also, assignment writing for tutorials at Cambridge
is optional. Undergraduate students can choose not to produce written
assignments for tutorials (or simply not turn up to them). However, by not
participating they are foregoing the most important learning experience at
Cambridge. The tutorial and written assignment system is the fundamental
pedagogic difference between Cambridge and other universities and a key
reason why Cambridge has been so successful. It is worth £2000 per year for
each undergraduate student (previously paid by the government but not any
longer as of this year
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/oct/14/highereducation.universityfunding
). Students are very aware of this and very rarely
miss supervisions or fail to submit written assignments.

From my experience in teaching these supervisions
(I also taught economics and finance for which essays were assigned) I dont
believe that plagiarism is rampant. Instead I interpret the high figures
along the lines suggested by Dave Albrecht, that although 49% of students
have plagiarised at some point, each student has done it very rarely.

By the way, a huge thankyou from across the pond to
you and the other contributors to this list, and for the great material on
your website.

Paul Guest

Some cheating scandals may not be scandals

Question
In the Central Florida University cheating scandal was it student cheating
or instructor laziness?
Watch the video?

This article below blames the Central Florida University management
instructor (Richard Quinn) for being lazy in using test questions that the
publisher allowed students to download for study and review. Perhaps it was not
the scandal as grave as we were led to believe. It certainly appears the media
over-reacted on this one.
Also see
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/17/cheating

In the article below you have to scroll down past the LSU physics professor
discussion to see the discussion on the Richard Quinn video that's now off
the air.But no, I found the video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4It may not stay there long!

Answer
1: SchoolSucks.com --- http://www.schoolsucks.com/
Note that this site purportedly has a minimum of 250,000 hits per day
according to the November 10, 2002 Sixty Minutes show.

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Jensen's conclusion: Listening to the above revelation that some
professors are using the same cheat sites as students will not not exactly help
convince students that this is a wrong thing to do in education and in
society. But then again, students and their professors get even more
cynical about cheating morality as they watch leaders in corporate governance,
auditing firms, churches, charities, and government being accused daily of
massive frauds and influence peddling.

Hi Dan,

Now let's wait a minute on the "Wait a minute"If your entire future rides on getting an A in a course, you might be
tempted to crib for competitive advantage. Or you may be a geek who just
takes clever cheating up as a challenge.

As Rchard Sansing pointed out, if you print on the back
of the label of a water bottle and paste it back on the bottle, your can read it
easily in magnified print from the other side of the bottle. It is not
necessary to reverse the printing. However, if you want to use a mirror up
a pant leg or skirt, you may need to reverse the printing.

It is pretty easy to get small print. Simply
try Font Size 8 in MS Word.

As far reading backwards is concerned, dyslexics have an
advantage if the print is not reversed.

Actually a somewhat better approach would be to type
whatever you want, paste in whatever graphs and tables you want, capture the
screen, then reduce the size to whatever it takes to fit inside the water
bottle, and then create a mirror image in your graphics or MS Word software. However,
you may want to wear a special kind of spectacles for magnification.You can read the following in the Help file of MW Word:

If I write on a water bottle in
tiny print and then read through the water, the print will be bigger but it
will be BACKWARDS.A middle of the
night experiment confirms this.Would
it really be that helpful to have a tiny print, written-backwards cheat
sheet?????? I doubt it.

My point is that the media may
be "over the top" in reporting some of the evidence on the cheating
problem in today's University.Yes
I believe there is a cheating scandal, but to paraphrase from Charlotte's Web,
"people believe anything that they read."Let's not make this mistake.

I did not expect there to be too many accounting term papers at
the term paper mills. This turns out to be naive. For example, there
are over 200 papers on some very interesting accountancy topics at http://www.termpapersrus.com/
Include the following in your search:

The Web puts answers to most questions
-- not to mention ready-made term papers -- at students' fingertips. One
educator says it's time to assign work that truly makes kids think.

Jamie McKenzie has
spent his whole career trying to get schools "to ask better
questions." But now that he preaches better questions as an antidote for
rampant Internet plagiarism, a lot more teachers are listening.

In the professional
development seminars he gives, McKenzie said, 60 to 80 percent of teachers
cite cases of plagiarism in their classrooms. A more formal study, conducted
by a professor at Rutgers University, found that more than half of high school
kids "have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments
using the Internet."

According to
McKenzie, however, students aren't solely to blame for this trend. Many
assignments teachers give, he said, are conducive to cheating. "It is
reckless and irresponsible to continue requiring topical 'go find out about'
research projects in this new electronic context," McKenzie wrote in a
1998 article in "From Now On," an online educational journal he
edits.

Instead, teachers
must distinguish between trivial research and meaningful research, which asks
kids to "analyze, interpret, infer or synthesize" material they have
read.

Patti Tjomsland said
that in Washington's Mark Morris High School, where she serves as a media
specialist, the standard book report of the old days does not even exist
anymore. Instead, teachers favor compare-and-contrast essays or personal
opinion pieces asking students what they would do in a certain situation.
Content for these kinds of essays, Tjomsland explained, is not readily
available online.

McKenzie hopes that
more schools will follow Mark Morris High's example. "A lot of concern
(about plagiarism) is translated into more careful scrutiny," he said.
"I would like to see the concern translated into better
assignments."

Last month I posted a
message regarding six accounting majors who had cheated in my class. Thank you
for the responses with ideas about teaching ethics. It turned out that six
other accounting majors had cheated in a different class and my original
concern grew so much that I decided to take at look at the literature on
academic misconduct (Thank you to Bob Jensen his usual helpful links).

Essentially, the
research says that the problem is far more widespread than professors want to
acknowledge (and business students are among the worse cheaters). BUT the
literature also indicates that academic misconduct can be significantly
reduced by raising student awareness of the issues through class discussion,
signed honor codes, and having students know that real enforcement with
significant penalties is occurring. Given Enron, and the significant fallout
which is going to occur, I think it is very easy to tie the need for academic
integrity into the need for professional integrity.

Along these lines I
am attaching three documents I have prepared which I will be using in my class
from now on. I have had several students review these documents with positive
feedback. I would also appreciate any feedback you have.

My plan is to lecture
about ethics and then to have students read the letter on the need for
academic and professional integrity. After that there is an ethics worksheet
for the students to complete and an honor code for them to sign.

I sense that I do not
speak for myself alone when I say that my classes have become so packed with
trying to cram in the ever burgeoning standards that I haven't paid nearly
enough attention to ethics in the last few years. If anyone shares that
concern and finds the attached materials may be of help please feel free to
make any use of them desired.

I also now have an
easy to use cheating software program from the University of Virginia that was
used to catch 122 Physics students plagiarizing. It is available free of
charge at

A university press in China appears to be selling
transcripts of Yale University’s free online courses in a new volume,
sparking complaints from Yale officials. Under the terms of the course
giveaway, calledOpen
Yale Courses, others cannot profit from the material.

Shaanxi Normal University Press recently published
the compilation of five Yale open courses, according to a post today on a
Yale Alumni Magazine blog. The book
reportedly lifted largely from Chinese subtitles translated by a nonprofit
group called YYeT, though that group insists it was not involved in the
publication, whose author is listed as Wu Han.

A Yale University professor has written a stern
letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught
at Peking University this fall.

“The fact that I have encountered this much
plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and
administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of
it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment,
probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it
would not be this frequent.”

Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of
protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the
pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese
institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into
a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores
international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in
copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international
copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite
directly.”

Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter,
titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the
Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on
New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases
of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese
translation.)

Continued in article

But they know enough about U.S. culture to sue
Hopefully Duke made all of its MBA students sign that they understood the honor
code

Not
surprisingly, some of the students are contesting their
sentences. This week, a Durham lawyer who’s filed appeals on
behalf of 16 of the students
cried foul to the Associated Press,
arguing that all nine of the expelled
students were from Asian countries, and that the students in
question failed to fully understand the honor code and the
judicial proceedings.

Excuses,
excuses? Maybe; maybe not. Regardless, the complaints serve
to spotlight some of the particular challenges inherent in
addressing issues of academic integrity involving
international students, many of whom come to American
colleges with different conceptions of cheating. As the
number of international students has increased in recent
years — and the number of academic misconduct incidents
involving international students has risen accordingly —
educators have increasingly embraced the need to address
academic integrity concerns proactively, recognizing in
their actions the various cultural influences that can help
cause one to cheat.

“These
issues come up in unusual ways. It doesn’t mean there isn’t
cheating in China [for instance]. There is,” says Sidney L.
Greenblatt, senior assistant director of advising and
counseling at Syracuse University and an expert on China
(he’s currently writing an essay for a collection on
cultural aspects of academic integrity, and has co-authored
a publication on “U.S.
Classroom Culture” highlighting
these issues). “People present false credentials to the
American embassy and corruption in the system is about what
it is here.”

A Yale University professor has written a stern
letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught
at Peking University this fall.

“The fact that I have encountered this much
plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and
administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of
it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment,
probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it
would not be this frequent.”

Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of
protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the
pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese
institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into
a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores
international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in
copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international
copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite
directly.”

Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter,
titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the
Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on
New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases
of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese
translation.)

Continued in article

Spotted: a new trend called plagio-riffingStudents are growing lazier about the whole process of
copying, not even bothering to change fonts in a cut-and-paste excerpt or
otherwise disguise their tracks. When asked why he inserted an entire page
printed in Black Forest Gothic in a paper written in Courier, a student in
freshman composition expressed surprise: “If you start changing things, that’s
cheating, right?” The path of least resistance continues, often refreshingly
low-tech. A Psychology 200 instructor reported a student handing in a Xerox of
an article with the author’s name whited out and her own inserted. “I did the
best I could,” confessed the student. “I didn’t have my laptop with me, and I
was in a hurry.” . . . Spotted: a new trend
called plagio-riffing, where students get together and mix and match five or
more papers into one by sampling and lifting choice paragraphs to the beat of
George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (plagiarized from “He’s So Fine”).
David Galef, "Report from the Academic Committee on Plagiarism," Inside Higher
Ed, June 10, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/06/10/galef

Academic cheating and dishonesty have long been a
problem. But with YouTube students have discovered a new avenue for actually
promoting such fraud. Liz Losh, a rhetorician at the University of
California at Irvine, notes that there’s now a genre of videos that combine
cheating advice with a “do-it-yourself aesthetic.” She flagged one of them
Wednesday on her blog. It shows a student using a scanner and photo-editing
software to make a cheat sheet on a Coke bottle.

When I first tried EssayTyper, for just a moment it
chilled my blood. Of course, it’s just a little joke; but I hope students
everywhere will be sophisticated enough to see that, because a person who
was unusually naive, lazy, and ignorant just might mistake it for a computer
program that will enable you to type out custom-designed essays on selected
academic topics, even topics you know nothing about, even if you can’t type.
The EssayTyper home
pagepresents a box saying:

Oh, no! It’s finals week and I have to finish
my American Civil War
essay immediately.

You can type in a replacement for “American Civil
War”; whatever you please: “praseodymium” or “eagles” or “Cole Porter” or
“phonetics” or “Chronicle of Higher Education” or “lingua franca”—anything
you could imagine someone being expected to write an essay on.

If then you click on the pencil icon on the right
hand side, you get what appears to be a word-processor page with a centered
header providing a fashionably absurd postmodernist title for your essay:
“The Fluidity of Praseodymium: Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the Study of
the Modern ‘Praseodymium,’” or maybe “Truly Eagles? The Modern Eagles: a
Normative Critique.”

All you have to do after that is type. Type
anything. Rattle your fingers around on the keyboard like a child
pretending to type. Have your kitten walk on the keys. Tap the space bar. It
doesn’t matter. Text will appear, bit by bit: coherent, sensible text saying
true things about your chosen subject. Not very imaginative, but undeniably
accurate and probably worthy of a B grade.

Now, we already know that the
humor-detection module in our species is not innate,
so there is a real chance of my being disappointed in
our students: There may be some who think EssayTyper is more than a joke. I
continue to hope otherwise, partly because humor sensitivity is generally
stronger in the young, and partly because I simply don’t want to live in a
world where this tool might be used to create essays that might be turned in
for me to grade.

EssayTyper is actually (to give the game away
completely) a front end to Wikipedia. When you type your subject in on the
underlined part of the initial box, it simply looks those words up using the
Wikipedia search function. If there is no Wikipedia page with that title, it
warns you that it can’t help. But if there is one, it goes to it and starts
blurting out the text of the article, chunk by chunk. The more you rattle
the keys, the more it puts on your screen.

EssayTyper is less intriguing than Eliza,
an ingenious piece of programming that was originally
intended to demonstrate shallow-level simulation of human conversation but
ended up unexpectedly demonstrating human gullibility. EssayTyper is a cute
little piece of recreational programming fun, but underlying it is nothing
more than an automated Wikipedia copier.

So even for students who think they can get away
with turning in unmodified Wikipedia articles as term papers, EssayTyper
would be an unneeded middleman. Screen-scooping selected text directly from
Wikipedia itself would be quicker.

But as I said, when I first saw it working, for a
minute or so I was scared. It isn’t real, and it doesn’t pretend to be, but
what if it were? What if, five or 10 years from now, sophisticated
programming permits generation of highly plausible text on arbitrary
subjects that has been skillfully rearranged from its various online
sources, with random words replaced sensibly by synonyms, so that
plagiarism-detecting algorithms report nothing untoward? What if machines
can one day write convincing original term papers that have not gone through
even one human brain before being dumped to the printer?

When I first tried EssayTyper, for just a moment it
chilled my blood. Of course, it’s just a little joke; but I hope students
everywhere will be sophisticated enough to see that, because a person who
was unusually naive, lazy, and ignorant just might mistake it for a computer
program that will enable you to type out custom-designed essays on selected
academic topics, even topics you know nothing about, even if you can’t type.
The EssayTyper home
pagepresents a box saying:

Oh, no! It’s finals week and I have to finish
my American Civil War
essay immediately.

You can type in a replacement for “American Civil
War”; whatever you please: “praseodymium” or “eagles” or “Cole Porter” or
“phonetics” or “Chronicle of Higher Education” or “lingua franca”—anything
you could imagine someone being expected to write an essay on.

If then you click on the pencil icon on the right
hand side, you get what appears to be a word-processor page with a centered
header providing a fashionably absurd postmodernist title for your essay:
“The Fluidity of Praseodymium: Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the Study of
the Modern ‘Praseodymium,’” or maybe “Truly Eagles? The Modern Eagles: a
Normative Critique.”

All you have to do after that is type. Type
anything. Rattle your fingers around on the keyboard like a child
pretending to type. Have your kitten walk on the keys. Tap the space bar. It
doesn’t matter. Text will appear, bit by bit: coherent, sensible text saying
true things about your chosen subject. Not very imaginative, but undeniably
accurate and probably worthy of a B grade.

Now, we already know that the
humor-detection module in our species is not innate,
so there is a real chance of my being disappointed in
our students: There may be some who think EssayTyper is more than a joke. I
continue to hope otherwise, partly because humor sensitivity is generally
stronger in the young, and partly because I simply don’t want to live in a
world where this tool might be used to create essays that might be turned in
for me to grade.

EssayTyper is actually (to give the game away
completely) a front end to Wikipedia. When you type your subject in on the
underlined part of the initial box, it simply looks those words up using the
Wikipedia search function. If there is no Wikipedia page with that title, it
warns you that it can’t help. But if there is one, it goes to it and starts
blurting out the text of the article, chunk by chunk. The more you rattle
the keys, the more it puts on your screen.

EssayTyper is less intriguing than Eliza,
an ingenious piece of programming that was originally
intended to demonstrate shallow-level simulation of human conversation but
ended up unexpectedly demonstrating human gullibility. EssayTyper is a cute
little piece of recreational programming fun, but underlying it is nothing
more than an automated Wikipedia copier.

So even for students who think they can get away
with turning in unmodified Wikipedia articles as term papers, EssayTyper
would be an unneeded middleman. Screen-scooping selected text directly from
Wikipedia itself would be quicker.

But as I said, when I first saw it working, for a
minute or so I was scared. It isn’t real, and it doesn’t pretend to be, but
what if it were? What if, five or 10 years from now, sophisticated
programming permits generation of highly plausible text on arbitrary
subjects that has been skillfully rearranged from its various online
sources, with random words replaced sensibly by synonyms, so that
plagiarism-detecting algorithms report nothing untoward? What if machines
can one day write convincing original term papers that have not gone through
even one human brain before being dumped to the printer?

A Dallas-based company that writes research papers, essays and other
classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says it is doing
so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers to more
than 100 in the past year.

The company bills itself as the one "students trust to write
professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to
face the burden of academic coursework."

It says the writing is done for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign
writers on staff for non-American students.

In a news release announcing the "custom writing service" for students
in the United States, the company includes the following testimonial:

"I enjoyed using the service," one student is quoted as saying. "The
paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so
am I."

Other testimonials on the company's website read:

"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they
can find a writer with a relevant academic background...But yes, they
did! It seems like she read my thoughts and written the paper (sic) as
if I did it myself, lol :-)"

And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a
few typos, but that’s okay."

The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15
percent after 20 orders.

In August, President Obama announced his plan to tie federal financial
aid to colleges and universities that do well in a yet-to-be-announced
college rating system. As
CNSNews.com reported at the time, the rating system means the
government will define what a good college is. - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#sthash.dAvEF9OY.dpuf

A Dallas-based company that writes research papers,
essays and other classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says
it is doing so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers
to more than 100 in the past year.

The company bills itself as the one "students trust
to write professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to face
the burden of academic coursework."

It says the writing is done for an "affordable"
fee; and it has foreign writers on staff for non-American students.

In a news release announcing the "custom writing
service" for students in the United States, the company includes the
following testimonial:

"I enjoyed using the service," one student is
quoted as saying. "The paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was
satisfied, and so am I."

Other testimonials on the company's website read:

"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I
wasn't sure if they can find a writer with a relevant academic
background...But yes, they did! It seems like she read my thoughts and
written the paper (sic) as if I did it myself, lol :-)"

And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better
(sic). Just noticed a few typos, but that’s okay."

The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten
orders; and 15 percent after 20 orders.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
One such company in Dallas is http://ownessays.com/
I did not find writers listing knowledge of accounting, but some advertise
expertise in finance and global finance.

I don't trust the promise of "no plagiarism" although the plagiarism may be
very clever.

Apparently a large part of the business is writing customized college
admissions essays.

Only 100 or so colleges maintain honor codes, which
are thought to bolster integrity and trust among professors and students by
involving the latter in the creation and enforcement of academic standards.
When a campus culture values open and frequent discussion about when and why
cheating is socially unacceptable, the thinking goes (and some research
shows), students are less likely to flout the rules – and more likely to
report their peers who do.

Except when they aren’t. Most traditional honor
codes allow for unproctored exams, where the professor leaves the room and
students are expected to report any cheating they observe. (Some even let
students take the exam wherever they choose.) But the system is not working
out so well at Middlebury College, where faculty members in economics will
proctor their exams this spring semester.

The decision follows a not-exactly-glowing
reviewof the state of Middlebury’s honor code,
which found that peer reporting across the board “is largely nonexistent.”

The Middlebury Campus lamented the shift
in
an editorial, calling it “a shameful reminder of a
broken system” and questioning why no students or professors are protesting
the decision or pressing the importance of the honor code.

“The honor code is a part of the Middlebury brand.
We love to point to the honor code as a demonstration of our integrity and
the type of community we come from,” the editorial board wrote. “What, then,
does it say about our future selves if we cannot expect integrity from our
community members now?”

Shirley M. Collado, dean of the college, declined
to comment on whether cheating is particularly rampant in economics, but
said via email that, on infrequent occasions, other departments have opted
out of unproctored exams. “While some students report cases of academic
dishonesty,” Collado said, “we don't believe that students are taking action
on all cases of academic dishonesty of which they are aware.”

The economics department will work with the student
government’s Honor Code Committee to gather information and “see what
approach will work best for the broader Middlebury community and to
encourage an environment of academic integrity,” Collado said.

“Middlebury’s Honor Code is not facing a moment of
crisis, nor is it functioning with optimal effectiveness,” the review says.
(A committee conducts the review every four years.) “Student ownership and
responsibility for the Honor Code – a critical tenet of its founding – is
severely waning.”

The Middlebury Campus writers posit that
because their peers had nothing to do with the honor code’s creation, and
“almost never hear about it after first-year orientation,” it makes sense
that students are not invested in the code.

Teddi Fishman, director of Clemson University’s
International Center for Academic Integrity, said the editorial is spot on.

“This writer understands academic integrity better
than some administrators do,” she said. It’s not surprising that students
wouldn’t adhere to an honor code they had no say in, especially one that’s
rarely discussed, she said. “Just having an honor code doesn’t do anything –
it has to be part of the culture.” (Similarly, a culture of academic
integrity does not necessarily require a code.)

Fishman praised the economics department’s
willingness to recognize that the code isn’t working, but said the campus
should work to “revitalize” the honor code in the meantime, to launch
conversations and get students caring about it again.

Jensen Comment
Honor codes that require students to report when other students cheat became
policies in colleges before there was such an over abundance of lawyers and our
extreme USA culture of litigation. Now when Student A reports that Student X
cheated, Student A may get slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Even if
colleges pledge to back Student A in litigation, the hassle of litigation itself
may motivate Student A to keep his or her mouth shut.

By the way, Harvard University is a leader in many areas of academe, but
Harvard does not have an honor code. Maybe administrators are tuned into the
Harvard Law School. Recall that Harvard somewhat recently expelled neary 70
students for cheating in a political science course where they were assured of
receiving an A grade no matter what the quality of the work. Apparently when an
A grade is assured, some students don't want to do any work.

Jensen Comment
I remember that in K-12 school students traded papers and checked answers. Now
we're coming full circle in distance education in the 21st Century. But there's
a huge difference between grading answers for work done in a classroom versus
work done remotely by distance education students. For example, an algebra or
calculus problem solved in class has controls on cheating when each student is
observed by other students and a teacher. Remotely, what is to prevent a student
from having Wolfram Alpha solve an algebra or calculus problem? --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/

But when a MOOC or SMOC has over 10,000 students I have difficulty imagining
how cheating can be controlled unless students are required to take examinations
under observation of a trusted person like the village vicar or a K-12 teacher
who is being paid to observe a student taking a MOOC or SMOC examination. Having
many such vicars or teachers attest to the integrity of the examination is both
expensive and not aperfect solution. But it sounds much better to me than having
remote students grading each other without being able to observe the examination
process.

The CrowdGrader software sounds like a great idea when students are willing
to help each other. I don't buy into this tool for assigning transcript grades.

'If you knew how I work!" Balzac wrote to a friend
in 1832 as he finished up another volume of what would become the "Comédie
humaine." "I am a galley slave to pen and ink, a true dealer in ideas." Dave
Tomar is no stranger to the feeling of tortured subjugation to the written
word, though whether one could justly call him a "dealer in ideas" is
another matter—"counterfeiter" is more like it.

In "The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping
College Kids Cheat," Mr. Tomar, a 32-year-old Rutgers graduate, describes
how, for the better part of a decade, he labored as a writer-for-hire
catering to incompetent and lazy students. It didn't matter if the task at
hand was a reflection on Nietzsche, a piece on Piaget's theory of genetic
epistemology, or a 150-page paper on public-sector investment in China and
India. Mr. Tomar, with not a small amount of help from Wikipedia, was a man
for all semesters.

The most amusing and disturbing tidbits of "The
Shadow Scholar" are excerpted communiqués from Mr. Tomar's clients that show
just how badly these arrested young minds required his assistance. "Let me
know what will the paper going to be about," one college student instructs
Mr. Tomar. "Also dont write about, abortion, euthanasia, clothing or death
penalty, yhose were not allowed by my teacher."

Mr. Tomar worked for only a few cents a word, but
he kept busy enough to earn $66,000 in 2010. (Not bad, especially
considering that the average pay for a non-tenure-track lecturer at Harvard
last year—an institution with its own student-plagiarism scandal at the
moment—was just under $57,000.) He was a freelancer for several of the
"hundreds and possibly thousands" of online paper mills in the United
States, services with names like rushessay.com and college-paper.org that
produce custom essays for their student clients. Lest you think that this
sleazy racket is a fringe, underground phenomenon, Mr. Tomar is here to
declare otherwise: "It's mainstream. It's popular culture. It's taxable
income. It's googleable."

"The Shadow Scholar" is a follow-up to a 2010 essay
of the same name that Mr. Tomar wrote, under the pseudonym Ed Dante, for the
Chronicle of Higher Education. The original essay was concise, hard-hitting
and topical, revealing the dirty details of a business that educators try
studiously to ignore. By contrast, Mr. Tomar's book is frequently
self-indulgent and meandering, as much a memoir of the author's post-college
search for purpose as a whistleblowing manifesto. Clichés and mixed
metaphors abound: "I'm tumbling into a well of bad memories the way that a
motorcycle backfiring in the distance might take a guy back to 'Nam," he
tells us in an eight-page account of a phone call to the Rutgers Parking and
Transportation Department.

For those willing to wade through it, however, "The
Shadow Scholar" is a fascinating exposé of the remarkably robust industry of
academic ghostwriting. Assuming that Mr. Tomar's story is at least roughly
faithful to the truth, his testimony amounts to a harrowing indictment of
the modern American university's current shortcomings as a meritocratic,
credentializing institution, much less a home for mental and moral growth.

Mr. Tomar didn't just aid and abet casual cheating.
Rather, he claims, he was engaged in a process of systemic intellectual
fraud that students took advantage of all the way up the academic ziggurat:
fabricating "personal statements" for unqualified college applicants;
crafting term papers for undergraduates and "cockpit parents" who diligently
directed their children's plagiarism; sweating over doctoral dissertations
with only one page of instructions to go on; even, in one extraordinary
case, doing the writing for an entire Ph.D. program in cognitive and
behavioral psychology on someone else's behalf.

Mr. Tomar's dispatches from the dark side certainly
do nothing to dispel the impression that, even as tuition hikes at many
colleges outpace inflation, American colleges and universities may be
delivering a product of declining value. Former Emory University president
William Chace, in a recent essay on the normalization of cheating in the
academy, wrote of a "suspicion that students are studying less, reading
less, and learning less all the time." The numbers back this up. Economists
Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks reported in 2010 that the number of hours
that full-time college students spent on their studies dropped by a third
between 1961 and 2003, to 27 hours per week from 40.

Having largely abandoned the mission of molding
student character, many American universities and colleges today find
themselves challenged to uphold the most minimal standards of technical
training and assessment. Sociologists Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum, in
their 2011 book "Academically Adrift," found that, of a nationally
representative sample of thousands of college students, over a third
demonstrated "no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex
reasoning and writing" after four years in college. Unable or unwilling to
do the work, many students find it far easier to hand it off to a
subcontractor.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Dave Tomar is now a student in the Yale Law school. He hopes that his extensive
experience in cheating will make him a successful lawyer.

Of Course a Professor Who Does Not Check for Plagiarism Would Not Detect
Horrific Plagiariasm
The other day, a student came into the writing center with an essay that she had
"written" for her final project. I was a page into it when I understood that it
had been horrendously plagiarized, and that I was being used as a preliminary
screening service to see if the blatant theft would pass her professor's eye
unnoticed. Of course, I knew it would. The professor wasn't particularly
perceptive about such things ...

The other day, a student came into the writing
center with an essay that she had "written" for her final project. I was a
page into it when I understood that it had been horrendously plagiarized,
and that I was being used as a preliminary screening service to see if the
blatant theft would pass her professor's eye unnoticed.

Of course, I knew it would. The professor wasn't
particularly perceptive about such things, and, frankly, almost every
research paper that I had seen for his course had been plagiarized to one
degree or another. He taught in the business school and knew a great deal
about managing people and businesses but practically nothing about writing
or the proper use of sources.

Perhaps he didn't really care. He once asked me to
"look over" a manuscript and "check it for grammar." When I found serious
structural and content inconsistencies, I felt obligated to inform him. But
he self-published the manuscript anyway in its original, unadulterated
format.

Still, the professor's student was in front of me
with her beautifully articulated copy-and-pasted essay that had undoubtedly
originated from some poor doctoral student's dissertation and contained
words like "adjudicated" and "prevaricates." I had been tutoring her for
weeks at the writing center. I would have loved to believe that the essay
was her own work, and that she had made astonishing progress in her writing,
due mostly to my own impeccable instruction. However, I had to admit that
the leap was, in fact, impossible given the condition of her previous week's
work—a narrative essay that had been filled with confused articles, mixed
prepositions, sentence fragments, and nonparallel structures, among other
problems.

So I had a dilemma. As an educator, I knew there
was no earthly way this student could produce a genuine five-page research
essay (by tomorrow) with her current skill set. But as a fellow human, I
also felt sorry that she had been passed along and never adequately prepared
for college-level writing, never shown how to read, how to summarize, or how
to select quotes.

What was my responsibility here as her tutor?
Clearly, the only reasonable thing to do was to give her a lesson on
plagiarism and sternly explain how she might be a better plagiarist in the
future.

To start with, I told her, her theme seemed curious
to me because it dealt with the inner workings of "lean manufacturing" as it
applied to the mass production of bioelectronics. I warned her that the
complexity of her topic choice might raise an astute professor's brow. More
than one student plagiarist has been apprehended trying to pass off as his
own work a Marxist reading of Willy Loman, or a metrical analysis of Yeats's
"Among School Children," when the student should have been describing Loman
as a pathetic loser or comparing Yeats to a jelly doughnut.

Worse, she had plagiarized a source that was well
beyond her syntactical command. It was obvious from word choice and sentence
construction that the essay had been written by someone with a profound
understanding of the Efficiency Movement of the early 20th century. A
professor attuned to plagiarism, I told her, would immediately pick up on
obscure words and phrases as signs of plagiarism, and would retrieve the
evidence from the Web.

A properly plagiarized essay, however, would
contain no obscure Latinate terminology. Every word would be three syllables
or less. The sentences would be basic, with maybe a few of the compound
variety, but no complex ones under any circumstances, and absolutely no
idioms. Not only did her use of obscure language make the offense more
glaring, but it also made reworking the paper a near impossibility as no
contemporary thesaurus would be helpful in suggesting alternate wording for
technical phrases.

The student agreed and promised to avoid any
syntactically complicated sources in future plagiarisms. However, that was
only the tip of her problem, as I went on to inform her, because even if she
had chosen a source with a somewhat basic paragraph and sentence structure,
she would still need to rearrange the lexicon to make it mirror her own
vernacular so that the professor wouldn't be alarmed by the disparity
between her speech and her writing style.

For that reason, certain portions of the essay
needed to be altered regardless of their grammatical correctness. In fact, I
advised her, a grammatical inconsistency would go a long way toward boosting
her credibility as an "original author" and dispel any hints of plagiarism.
I suggested that she misspell every few words or remove an occasional
article, out of principle.

In addition, the quotations must not be seamlessly
integrated into the research. To give the essay more authenticity, I
suggested she remove the introduction to every third quote, and neglect
explanations altogether so that the quotes would stand out like little
quarantined strangers in her essay. Better yet, she could replace every
fifth quote with a line from Disney's Fantasia, or at the very
least, with a text message so as to create the impression of authorial
distraction or perhaps technological interlude. Maybe she could insert a "2"
for "too," a "B" for "be," or an emoticon or an LOL in place of a genuine
emotional response.

Still, no matter how she reworded it, an entirely
plagiarized essay would always appear as a unified whole and, thus, raise
suspicion in an alert professor due to its very consistency. The professor
would ask: "Where are the essay's digressions? Where are its disconnected
paragraphs?"

And so I told her that to be truly thorough in her
plagiarism, she actually needed to copy from a variety of sources so that
the inconsistency in voice would appear genuine to the academic reader. In
addition, since structuring such a sophisticated act of plagiarism would be
a near impossibility for the student, the inevitable mixed bag that resulted
would undoubtedly replicate with accuracy a struggling student's writing.

Creative Computers Replacing Writers and ComposersAnd the frightening thing about this is that what might be "cheating"
becomes possible with zero chance of being caught for plagiarism of things
stories and songs written by Hal.

Here’s more about the program,
used in
one corner of Forbes‘ website: “Narrative
Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative
content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data
sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and
tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories,
headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”

What do you think?
The
Narrative Sciencetechnology could potentially
impact many corners of the writing trade. The company has a long list of
stories they can computerize: sports stories, financial reports, real estate
analyses, local community content, polling & elections, advertising campaign
summaries sales & operations reports and market research.

While company shares have dropped 17.2% over
the last three months to close at $13.72 on February 15, 2012, Barnes & Noble (BKS)
is hoping it can break the slide with solid third quarter results when
it releases its earnings on Tuesday, February 21, 2012.

What to Expect: The Wall Street consensus is
$1.01 per share, up 1% from a year ago when Barnes & Noble reported
earnings of $1 per share.

The consensus estimate is down from three
months ago when it was $1.42, but is unchanged over the past month.
Analysts are projecting a loss of $1.09 per share for the fiscal year.

The company originated with two electrical
engineering and computer science professors at Northwestern University.
Here’s more about the company:
“[It began with] a software program that automatically generates sports
stories using commonly available information such as box scores and
play-by-plays. The program was the result of a collaboration between
McCormick and Medill School of Journalism. To create the software, Hammond
and Birnbaum and students working in McCormick’sIntelligent
Information Labcreated algorithms that use
statistics from a game to write text that captures the overall dynamic of
the game and highlights the key plays and players. Along with the text is an
appropriate headline and a photo of what the program deems as the most
important player in the game.”

Profanity: A Web site
promoting Oberlin College co-created by its social media
coordinator,
Why the F*** Should I Choose Oberlin?, drew varied reactions and plenty of attention
last week. The site, which notes it is not officially affiliated
with Oberlin, collects profanity-laced quotes about why Oberlin is
great. Georgy Cohen
interviews the co-creator, Ma’ayan
Plaut, who says she has “tacit and unofficial approval” from her
boss. On Higher Ed Marketing, Andrew Careaga says his inner
15-year-old thought the site is brilliant, but his 51-year-old
“shook his jaded head.”

Design: Keith Hampson argues that good
design will play an increasingly important rolein the college student experience as college
move online. “Somehow, though, digital higher education—both its
software and content—has managed to remain untouched by good design.
Design is not even on the agenda,” he says.

A new studyby Turnitin, the plagiarism detection
service, has found that term paper mills account only for a small minority
(15 percent) of the apparent sources of the copying. One-third of such
material comes from social networks and another one-fourth from "legitimate"
educational sources.

The Web is going social. And now it seems that plagiarism might be
heading that way, too.

A new
study found that social and user-generated Web sites are the most
popular sources for student copying. Academic sites come in second, while
paper mills and cheat sites are third.

A report on the findings was released today by iParadigms, creator of
Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service that takes uploaded student
papers and checks them against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal
content. For its study, the company analyzed 40 million papers submitted by
high school and college students over a 10-month period.

“It shows that plagiarism in sourcing work is going the way that
everything else in the world is going,” says Chris Harrick, vice president
of marketing at Turnitin. “People are relying more on their peers than on
experts.”

But the findings come with a big caveat: Turnitin detects “matched
content,” not necessarily plagiarism. In other words, the software will flag
material from a paper mill, but it will also flag legitimate stuff that is
properly cited and attributed. The company leaves it up to individual
professors to determine plagiarism. So there’s no way to know exactly how
much of the copying highlighted in this study, outside of the material that
matches content from shady sites, is actually cheating.

The State
University of New York Upstate
Medical University is investigating
allegations that some fourth-year
students cheated in a
medical-literature course,reportsThe
Post-Standard, in Syracuse. The
students, who are scheduled to
graduate in May, could be expelled,
or face lesser punishment, if the
charges are true, said the dean,
Steven Scheinman. One student told
school officials that some students
in the course had collaborated in
taking online tests, which is not
permitted.

BlackBerrys and iPhones need just a couple of taps
of the keypad to offer the right answers. It doesn't matter whether the
subject is math, social studies, science, English, or a foreign language.
Information is available at your fingertips, just as advertised.

Indeed, we have to face a simple fact about
students today: As technology has evolved to provide a vast wealth of
information at any time, anywhere, cheating has never been easier.

In the good old days, cheating was a simple affair
and as a result not too difficult to track down, like the time a girl with
limited English skills in one of my high school English classes handed in a
terrifically written, sophisticated short story. She copied, word for word,
Shirley Jackson's story "Charles," except for changing the title character's
name. I guess she thought I wouldn't have a chance hunting down the story
once she cleverly renamed her story "Bob." Alas, catching a cheater is not
so easy any more.

Smartphone Photos

A few years ago, students would write the answers
on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have
students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of
the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions
before they walk into the classroom.

Now catching the cheaters requires a level of
vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National
Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher.

Today, students wouldn't have to rely merely on
CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on
Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes,
PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless
supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google
"Hamlet Essay," and you'll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first
page of which is teeming with free essays.

Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by
typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine
to discover the source. And such websites as Turnitin.com, which checks
student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work
for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are
so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy,
that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks
of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of
teachers.

Fonts of Duplicity

Of course, even in this technological age, some
students are so lazy they won't even bother to match the font and the type
size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately
cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once
told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a
website. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written
in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish.

Yet, we can't count on incompetence. Many students
are so wily and crafty that they've learned to mask their cheating to
impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking
you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical
contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover
their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative.

Jensen Comment
I became discouraged with take home exam when one of my students paid to
outsource taking of the examination to an agent. If the agent had not
plagiarized it would've been impossible to catch his boss (the enrolled
student). Most of my take home examinations, however, were only a small portion
of the grade and the heavily-weighted final examination was not a take-home
examination. I think all courses, including online courses, should have a
monitored final examination. There are ways of dealing with this in distance
education courses ---

The frontier in the battle to defeat student
cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central
Florida.

No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could
disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice
outside.

The 228 computers that students use are recessed
into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say,
a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test
later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with
the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he
records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead
camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for
evidence.

Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the
testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s
third-largest campus by enrollment, said that cheating had dropped
significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered
during the spring semester.

“I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out
about it,” Mr. Ellis said.

As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has
gone high-tech — not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the
Internet and sharing of homework online like music files — educators have
responded with their own efforts to crack down.

This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to
select roommates and courses, some colleges — Duke and Bowdoin among them —
are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before
they can enroll.

Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to
submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five
percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to
the Campus Computing Survey.

The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in
an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to
outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the
company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’
Turnitin?”

The extent of student cheating, difficult to
measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000
undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted
to cheating on assignments and exams.

The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent
earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald
L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it.
Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at
all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the
Internet.

Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell,
where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears
cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told
him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.

Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to
pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring
attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial
on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other
generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as
yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.

Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an
epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has
been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease
of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,”
he said.

At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor,
was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had
developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of
physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I
thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he
realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read
them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from
friends who had already done the assignment.

About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their
homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this
year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero,
which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more
than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.

Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to
textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77
physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an
online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for
solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.

“You can use technology as well for detecting as
for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.

The most popular anti-cheating technology,
Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges.
Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived
Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to
instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several
years experience a decline in plagiarism.

Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many
tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in
plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a
Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the
Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither
scheme works.

Some educators have rejected the service and other
anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are
guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.

Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded
several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor
code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn
Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com
give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”

For similar reasons, some students at the
University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing
center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.

But recently during final exams after a summer
semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior,
was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent
students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the
fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is
the possibility for people to cheat.”

A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said
that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone
cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes.
She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you
to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”

For educators uncomfortable in the role of
anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an
elegantly simple technological fix.

That was the finding of a study published by the
National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed
selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize
two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that
plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)

The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas
S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.

“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of
adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of
guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating
students rather than by frightening them.”

Only a handful of colleges currently require
students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to
cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.

The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with
its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason
it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology
professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age
students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online
without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its
most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones
or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on
his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

On November 26, 2009 I was spammed by a so-called Mike
Watson providing a link to a site where students can supposedly submit their
assignments for “help” from experts ---
http://www.pupilhelp.com/The site also offers live chats with a paying student
regarding a homework assignment.

Pupilhelp
was born in the month of July 2006. Pupilhelp was started with a vision to help
students with their assignments and homework at an affordable price. More than
ten thousand students have benefited from the services of pupilhelp. The service
at pupilhelp is available for students all over the world. We at pupilhelp
believe in having the best among the best in the tutor team. Tutors are
recruited after a laborious process which tests their skills, knowledge on the
subject and willingness to work anytime, anywhere. Every tutor in pupilhelp
holds a master's degree or a doctorate degree in their respective subject. The
feed backs from our students have always been motivating and inspiring. We would
like to continue providing quality work at an affordable price which has always
been our unique feature. We would like to extend our thanks to students who have
supported us and we request you to continue your support. We hope that many more
students across the globe will use our service.

Pupilhelp
provides e-mail based Homework/Assignment Help to students from grade 12 to
Ph.D. level. Our primary objective is to help you in improving your grades and
to achieve academic excellence. With our help you can quickly and easily get
your assignment done by one of over 300 experts. Our service is focused on, time
delivery, superior quality, creativity, and originality for every service we
provide.

The discipline categories include “Accounting.”

My hunch is that the so-called assignment “counselors” are
probably sitting on top of hundreds of solutions manuals for major and even
minor textbooks. Text phrases from end-of-chapter assignments are probably
linked to answers in solutions manuals.

In any case, it is advised that instructors do not rely
heavily on end-of-chapter assignments for grading purposes. Perhaps students can
learn a great deal from counselors at this site, but for me the site does not
pass the smell test even though it claims to have a supposed "no plagiarism"
policy. I wonder how closely the recommended solutions follow the copyrighted
solutions in textbook manuals supposedly available only to course instructors.
Of course many of these solutions manuals are for sale at used book sites and
even on eBay and Craigslist.

I received 52 e-mails from him on Thursday. That it
took 52 to deliver the message made me think it was a bogus site.

I think most HW real person solutions differ from
the solutions manual only in terms of layout, as there's only one way the
answer can be.

I can't ever remember a publishers SM that provided
explanation that would benefit students. Presumably instructors don't need
the explanation, so it isn't provided. I recall the last time I taught
Advanced Accounting, and used a certain textbook with its HW problems. I had
to seek help to get some of those solutions explained to me. If
pupilhelp.com provides explanations, then it might be a service worth paying
for.

Given the publisher sites nowhave algorithmic HW,
I'm confident that pupilhelp.com has seen a decline in business. Of course,
with the economy it undoubtedly has a decline in revenues just like everyone
else. That could explain the spam-like broadcast advertising.

Jensen Comment
I think David is correct. I would warn students not to send credit card numbers
to this outfit.

Question
If you are using some commercial test bank for examinations in your course, can
students down load them here?http://www.e-junkie.com/

At a minimum, perhaps you should conduct a search in the same manner as
Professor Krause?

Note that when I enter "Spiceland" at
http://www.e-junkie.com/
there are zero hits.
Instructors must be more creative in their searches.

In a recent
discussion someone mentioned they use questions from an author's test bank.
A student has told me of the very readily available answer manuals and test
banks, and walked me through a real transaction. The example he used was
Spiceland's Financial Accounting text. Both manuals were available for
purchase, and payment was quite easy through PayPal.

Maybe I'm
naive, but I was not aware of the ease of obtaining this material.

The answer
manual was an exact copy of what instructors can download or get on a CD.

I tried
"Financial accounting horngren" and got a reply "either the listing or the
payment method has been removed"

For a listing of all products at this site and to see
if your text is available there, try
http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/ I'm sure there are
other sites also, I didn't bother to go any deeper.

So what? We
must assume that all answers and all test questions are available to any
computer literate accounting major (that is all accounting majors). If we
feel test banks are a good study guide for students, if they review all
questions in a test bank, then I suppose it is OK. However, if we want to
maintain integrity of tests, forget about using test banks.

Here is the flip side—I periodically teach the
capstone course for the management department. The book I use was published
by Houghton Mifflin. Sometime in the recent past, Cengage acquired Houghton
Mifflin. When I asked Cegage for the test bank (which is an instructor
resource listed in the book), first I was told there wasn’t one. Then I was
told, if there was one, it must have “fell into a crack” during the
acquisition. I told my students that if I couldn’t get the test bank I would
have to make up my own exam from scratch. That put fear into my students, so
several of them said they could get a copy of the test bank for me!
Ultimately, after much complaining by me, Cengage looked into the crack and
found the CD, so I didn’t have to rely on my students to provide the test
bank.

I just went out there to check the links, and lo
and behold the prices have increased dramatically for Spiceland. My student
paid $15 at PayPal for an instant download.

I see the prices now are $29 for the Solutions
Manual and $41 for the Test Bank. The market works! Wait until mid-terms
come around to see how much the Test Bank goes for then.

Paul

February 17, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Paul,

Lest we make an assumption that the buyers are all students, I think that
your posting on the AECM inspired a boat load of instructors to order the
Spiceland test bank, e.g., the instructors who adopted Kieso might want to
confuse their students who all bought the Kieso test bank for courses
requiring the Kieso textbook.

In other words, we can attribute much of the increase in test bank demand
to you Paul.

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy
student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper
on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric
cars.

Screen after screen, assignment after
assignment—hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come
from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community
colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others
request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from
the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former
essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company,
tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The
company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called custom essays, meaning that
its employees will write a paper to a student's specifications for a
per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are
invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What's
surprising is how sophisticated and international they've become, not to
mention profitable.

In a previous era, you might have found an
essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll
find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in
Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their
administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to
outsource their academic work.

And if the exponential surge in the number
of essay mills is any indication, the problem is only getting worse. But
who, exactly, is running these companies? And what do the students who use
their services have to say for themselves?

Go to Google and type "buy an essay."
Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is "Providing
Students with Original Papers since 1997." It's a professional-looking site
with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of
satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver "quality custom written
papers" by writers with either a master's degree or a Ph.D. Prices range
from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.

To place an order, you describe your
assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter
your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in
your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in.
Simple.

What's going on behind the scenes,
however, is another story.

The address listed on the site is in
Reston, Va. But it turns out that's the address of a company that allows
clients to rent "virtual office space" — in other words, to claim they're
somewhere they're not. A previous address used by Best Essays was a UPS
store in an upscale strip mall. And while the phone number for Best Essays
has a Virginia area code, that line is registered to a company that allows
customers to forward calls anywhere in the world over the Internet.

The same contact information appears on
multiple other essay-mill Web sites with names like Rush Essay, Superior
Papers, and Best Term Paper. All of these sites are operated by Universal
Research Inc., also known as Essay Writers. The "US/Canada Headquarters" for
the company, according to yet another Web site, is in Herndon, Va. An Essay
Writers representative told a reporter that the company's North American
headquarters was a seven-story building with an attached garage and valet
parking.

That was a lie. Drive to the address, and
you will find a perfectly ordinary suburban home with a neatly trimmed front
lawn and a two-car garage. The owner of the house is Victor Guevara and,
ever since he bought it in 2004, he has received lots of strange mail. For
instance, a calendar recently arrived titled "A Stroll Through Ukrainian
Cities," featuring photographs of notable buildings in Odessa and Yalta. Not
all of the missives, however, have been so benign. Once a police officer
came to the door bearing a complaint from a man in India who hadn't been
paid by Essay Writers. Mr. Guevara explained to the officer that he had no
idea what the man was talking about.

So why, of all the addresses in the United
States, was Mr. Guevara's chosen? He's not sure, but he has a theory. Before
he bought the house, a woman named Olga Mizyuk lived there for a short time.
The previous owner, a friend of Mr. Guevara's, let her stay rent free
because she was down on her luck and she promised to teach him Russian. Mr.
Guevara believes it's all somehow connected to Ms. Mizyuk.

That theory is not too far-fetched. The
state of Virginia listed Olga Mizyuk as the agent of Universal Research LLC
when it was formed in 2006, though that registration has since lapsed (it's
now incorporated in Virginia with a different agent). The company was
registered for a time in Nevada, but that is no longer valid either. The
managing member of the Nevada company, according to state records, was Yuriy
Mizyuk. Mr. Guevara remembers that Ms. Mizyuk spoke of a son named Yuriy.
Could that all be a coincidence?

Hiring in Manila

Call any of the company's several phone
numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night.
The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or
Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will
reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will
be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.

If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will
direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always
either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls,
The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering
any questions.

But while the company's management may be
publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some
light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the
capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since
1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened
offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.

The company's customer-service center is
located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial
district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from
there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students.
The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and
computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves
making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on
the first page of Google results. (They're doing a good job, too. Recently
two of the first three hits for "buy an essay" were Essay Writers sites.)
One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior
search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page
that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link
builders.

Some of the company's writers work in its
Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers,
which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to
a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between
$1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction
of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently
advertising for more writers, praising itself as "one of the most trusted
professional writing companies in the industry."

It's difficult to know for sure who runs
Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr.
Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for
essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to
receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk
and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to
reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service
representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.

Installed in its Makati City offices,
according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on
employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing
the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same
source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as
a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. "He looks like
Harry Potter," the source says. "The worst kind of Harry Potter."

Writers for Hire

The writers for essay mills are anonymous
and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week,
hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to
$40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the
freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose.
Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

James Robbins is one of the good ones. Mr.
Robbins, now 30, started working for essay mills to help pay his way through
Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex. He continued after graduation and, for a
time, ran his own company under the name Mr. Essay. What he's discovered,
after writing hundreds of academic papers, is that he has a knack for the
form: He's fast, and his papers consistently earn high marks. "I can knock
out 10 pages in an hour," he says. "Ten pages is nothing."

His most recent gig was for Essay Writers.
His clients have included students from top colleges like the University of
Pennsylvania, and he's written short freshman-comp papers along with longer,
more sophisticated fare. Like all freelancers for Essay Writers, Mr. Robbins
logs in to a password-protected Web site that gives him access to the
company's orders. If he finds an assignment that's to his liking, he clicks
the "Take Order" button. "I took one on Christological topics in the second
and third centuries," he remembers. "I didn't even know what that meant. I
had to look it up on Wikipedia."

Most essay mills claim that they're only
providing "model" papers and that students don't really turn in what they
buy. Mr. Robbins, who has a law degree and now attends nursing school, knows
that's not true. In some cases, he says, customers have forgotten to put
their names at the top of the papers he's written before turning them in.
Although he takes pride in the writing he's done over the years, he doesn't
have much respect for the students who use the service. "These are kids
whose parents pay for college," he says. "I'll take their money. It's not
like they're going to learn anything anyway."

That's pretty much how Charles Parmenter
sees it. He wrote for Essay Writers and another company before quitting
about a year ago. "If anybody wants to say this is unethical — yeah, OK, but
I'm not losing any sleep over it," he says. Though he was, he notes, nervous
that his wife would react badly when she found out what he was doing. As it
happens, she didn't mind.

Mr. Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a
police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started
writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well.
He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of
English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of
his papers was too high. "People would come back to me and say, 'It's a
great paper, but my professor will never believe it's me,'" says Mr.
Parmenter. "I had to dumb them down."

Eventually the low pay forced him to quit.
In his best months, he brought home around $1,000. Other months it was half
that. He estimates that he wrote several hundred essays, all of which he's
kept, though most he can barely remember. "You write so many of these things
they start running together," he says.

Both Mr. Parmenter and Mr. Robbins live in
the United States. But the writers for essay mills are increasingly
international. Most of the users who log into the Essay Writers Web site are
based in India, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic.
A student in, say, Wisconsin usually has no idea that the paper he ordered
online is being written by someone in another country.

Like Nigeria. Paul Arhewe lives in Lagos,
that nation's largest city, and started writing for essay mills in 2005.
Back then he didn't have his own computer and had to do all of his research
and writing in Internet cafes. Now he works as an online editor for a
newspaper, but he still writes essays on the side. In the past three years,
he's written more than 200 papers for American and British students. In an
online chat, Mr. Arhewe insisted that the work he does is not unethical. "I
believe it is another way of learning for the smart and hardworking
students," he writes. Only lazy students, Mr. Arhewe says, turn in the
papers they purchase.

Mr. Arhewe started writing for Essay
Writers after another essay mill cheated him out of several hundred dollars.
That incident notwithstanding, he's generally happy with the work and
doesn't complain about the pay. He makes between $100 and $350 a month
writing essays — not exactly a fortune, but in a country like Nigeria, where
more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it's not
too bad either.

Mr. Arhewe, who has a master's degree from
the University of Lagos, has written research proposals and dissertations in
fields like marketing, economics, psychology, and political science. While
his English isn't quite perfect, it's passable, and apparently good enough
for his clients. Says Mr. Arhewe: "I am enjoying doing what I like and
getting paid for it."

Write My Dissertation

Some customers of Essay Writers are
college freshmen who, if their typo-laden, grammatically challenged order
forms are any indication, struggle with even the most basic writing tasks.
But along with the usual suspects, there is no shortage of seniors paying
for theses and graduate students buying dissertations.

One customer, for example, identifies
himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is
interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that
the dissertation must be "well-researched" and includes format requirements
and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of
Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT's Web site. The student also
suggests areas of emphasis like "static and dynamic stability of aircraft
controls."

The description is consistent with the
kind of research graduate students do, according to Barbara Lechner,
director of student services at the institute's department of aeronautics
and astronautics. In an initial interview, Ms. Lechner said she would bring
up the issue with others in the department. Several weeks later, Ms. Lechner
said she was told by higher-ups not to respond to The Chronicle's inquiries.

The head of the department, Ian A. Waitz,
says he doesn't believe it's possible, given the highly technical subject
matter, for a graduate student to pay someone else to research and write a
dissertation. "It seems like a bogus request," says Mr. Waitz, though he
wasn't sure why someone would fake such an order. However, like Ms. Lechner,
Mr. Waitz acknowledged that the topics in the request are consistent with
the department's graduate-level research.

Would-be aerospace engineers aren't the
only ones outsourcing their papers. A student at American University's law
school ordered a paper for a class called "The Law of Secrecy." She didn't
include her full name on the order, but she did identify one of her two
professors, Stephen I. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck — who immediately knew the
identity of the student from the description of the paper — was surprised
and disappointed because he tries to help students who are having trouble
and because he had talked to her about her paper. Mr. Vladeck argues that a
law school "has a particular obligation not to tolerate this kind of stuff."
The student never actually turned in the paper and took an "incomplete" for
the course.

Essay Writers attempts to hide the
identities of its customers even from the writers who do the actual work.
But it's not always successful. Some students inadvertently include personal
information when they upload files to the Web site; others simply put their
names at the bottom of their orders.

Jessica Dirr is a graduate student in
communication at Northern Kentucky University and an Essay Writers customer.
She hired the company to work on her paper "Separated at Birth: Symbolic
Boasting and the Greek Twin." Ms. Dirr says she looked online for assistance
because the university's writing center wasn't much help and because she had
trouble with citation rules. She describes what Essay Writers did as mostly
proofreading. "They made some suggestions, and I took their advice," she
says. Unfortunately, Ms. Dirr says, the paper "wasn't up to the level my
professor was hoping for."

Mickey Tomar paid Essay Writers $100 to
research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New
Testament class. Mr. Tomar, a senior at James Madison University majoring in
philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your
academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. "Like most
people in college, you don't have time to do research on some of these
things," he says. "I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality
writing."

Nicole Cohea paid $190 for a 10-page paper
on a Dove soap advertising campaign. Ms. Cohea, a senior communications
major at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote in her order that she
wanted the company to "add on to what I have already written." She helpfully
included an outline for the paper and wondered whether the writer could "add
a catchy quote at the beginning."

When asked whether it was wrong, in
general, to pay someone else to write your essay, Ms. Cohea responded,
"Definitely." But she says she wasn't planning to turn in the paper as her
own; instead, she says, she was only going to use it to get ideas. She was
not happy with the paper Essay Writers provided. It seemed, she says, to
have been written by a non-native English speaker. "I could tell they were
Asian or something just by the grammar and stuff," she says.

James F. Kollie writes a sporadically
updated blog titled My Ph.D. Journey in which he chronicles the progress
he's making toward his doctorate from Walden University. He recently ordered
the literature-review portion of his dissertation, "The Political Economy of
Privatization in Post-War Developing Countries," from Essay Writers. In the
order, he explains that the review should focus on privatization efforts
that have failed.

Mr. Kollie acknowledged in an interview
that he had placed an order with Essay Writers, but he said it was not
related to his dissertation. Rather, he says, it was part of a separate
research project he's conducting into online writing services. When asked if
his university was aware of the project, he replied, "I don't have time for
this," and hung up the phone.

Policing Plagiarism

Some institutions, most notably Boston
University, have made efforts to shut down essay mills and expose their
customers. A handful of states, including Virginia, have laws on the books
making it a misdemeanor to sell college essays. But those laws are rarely,
if ever, enforced. And even if a case were brought, it would be extremely
difficult to prosecute essay-mill operators living abroad.

So what's a professor to do? Thomas
Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in
England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a
colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow
writers to bid on students' projects. Their paper concludes that because
there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and
disciplining students is the exception.

In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found
that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while
some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they're doing.
"You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within
hours of it being released to them," he says. "Which has to mean that they
were intending to cheat from the beginning."

What he recommends, and what he does
himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or
project they've just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and
shrugged shoulders, there's a chance they haven't read, much less written,
their own paper.

Susan D. Blum suggests assigning papers
that can't easily be completed by others, like a personal reflection on that
day's lecture. Ms. Blum, an associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published book My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture, also encourages professors to keep in touch
with students as they complete major projects, though she concedes that can
be tough in a large lecture class.

But Ms. Blum points out a more fundamental
issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of
talking to students about what college is about and why studying — which may
seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential — actually
matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she
says. "We need to convey that to them."

Mr. Tomar, the philosophy-and-religion
major who bought a paper for his New Testament class, still doesn't think
students should have to do their own research. But he has soured on essay
mills after the paper he received from Essay Writers did not meet his
expectations. He complained, and the company gave him a 30-percent refund.
As a result, he had an epiphany of sorts. Says Mr. Tomar: "I was like — you
know what? — I'm going to write this paper on my own."

Caveat Emptor, Law Students Seeking Outlines

The title of this post isn’t
designed to demonstrate any sort of proficiency in Latin but to alert law
students to the dangers of relying on outlines received from other students.
The risks posed by using passed-down outlines have been threatening law
students for almost as long as there have been law schools, but digital
technology coupled with the internet has multiplied the risk by orders of
magnitude. Ten or fifteen years ago, students could get their hands on
outlines for courses taught in the law school they were attending. In almost
every instance the outline was from a previous semester offering of the
course, taught by the same professor presently teaching the course.

Now, students at any law school can obtain outlines for just about any
course taught at any law school. Recently, my attention was drawn to
Outline Depot, which claims to be “the most
comprehensive source of law school outlines anywhere.” (emphasis in the
original). Perhaps it is, and I’ve not researched that point. Students earn
the right to download outlines by accumulating credits, which can be
obtained by uploading outlines or by purchasing the credits.

The point to which students are desperate to get their hands on outlines is
apparent from what one finds on the site. There are all sorts of red flags
and warning bells.

This is
primarily about law schools, and is a blog by a tax law professor no less,
but if there is one there surely is another. Outlines are useful, but in my
case mainly when I make one from material I am reading.

Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory
University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have
used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students
do not consider their behavior to be cheating.

He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we
see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead
the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the
digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a
repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new
realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the
definition of cheating. Right?”

Bob Jensen votes not to change the definition of cheating in the age of
texting!

Question
Have you looked for your examinations and tests at the latest test sharing
sites?

Photos. Music. Irrelevant video clips. For years,
college students have shared them all on the Internet. Now, they're using
the same medium to swap notes, tests, and quizzes—a trend that has caught
the wary eye of profs whose materials are being uploaded and school
officials who worry about cheating.

In recent years, several Web sites have emerged
that encourage students to submit their schoolwork for mass consumption.
They collect old exams (PostYourTest.com,
Exams101.com), class notes (NoteCentric.com),
study guides (HowIGotAnA.com)
and all of the above (CourseHero.com).
Some of the largest sites claim thousands of users around the world and say
they're making money.

High-Tech "Test Files" Students from an earlier
generation will recognize the note-sharing sites as a high-tech twist on an
old college practice. Fraternities and sororities have long maintained "test
files," where younger members study from older members' course work.
Non-Greeks, of course, have criticized the practice, saying it gives the
frat and sorority members an unfair advantage.

Indeed, Demir Oral, a Web designer living in San
Diego, says he launched the Post Your Test site to level the playing field.
"This kind of service should be available to anyone, at any time," he says.

Oral supports his site using Google ads, which
generate "a decent amount" of revenue, he says. But he's forecasting growth:
Since July, the site's member count has more than doubled, to 1,000, and it
currently hosts between 600 and 700 exams. A few weeks ago, Oral received
his first international submission, from Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.
"People are starting to realize the uniqueness of our database," he says.
"It's a very exciting time."

Backlash from Teachers and Students Not everyone is
buying into the hype, though. Because professors don't know when their exams
are being posted, they could unwittingly re-use a question students have
seen online, says Jim Posakony, a biology professor and former chairman of
the academic senate at the University of California at San Diego, where
teachers have organized to keep their exams off Post Your Test.

Having easy access to quizzes and notes could also
reward laziness, says Nichole Mikko-Causby, a senior at the University of
Georgia. "The whole trend seems to be more about getting the grade than
improving critical thinking skills," she says, noting that she's visited
Course Hero but never used it. "It kind of cheapens my degree."

Kasuni Kotelawala, a sophomore at University of
California, San Diego, is far more satisfied. Because her biology professor
hadn't spent much time discussing the most recent class midterm exam—let
alone distributing a practice test—Kotelawala wasn't sure how to study. But
after reviewing one of her professor's past exams on Post Your Test, she
says she knew what to expect. "It definitely helped," she says.

Copyright Issues But was it legal? Like novels and
artwork, exams are intellectual property, meaning they're owned by the
universities or the professors who wrote them, and they're protected under
copyright laws. Publishing them without permission is treading on "legal
thin ice," says Bob Clarida, a copyright lawyer at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman,
in New York.

Faculty members at UCSD raised this concern last
August, after representatives from Post Your Test visited campus. To promote
the site, the reps had offered Starbucks gift cards in exchange for student
exams, a gimmick that left some professors "very unhappy," says Posakony.

With Posakony's help, roughly 150 professors
organized. They told Oral to take their old exams off Post Your Test and to
reject future submissions bearing their names. He wasn't thrilled, but he
obliged. "We always follow the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," Oral says,
referencing the law that protects online service providers, like Post Your
Test and YouTube, as long as they honor requests to take down unlawful
uploads.

Continued in article

How would you deal with the following add on Craig's List where University
X is a well known university.

The person who placed this add shows signs of becoming a great banker.

"I Will Pay Someone $$$ To Take My Finance Final
Exam (at University X)"

The "Unknown Professor" (I know the name and location of this professor) who
maintains the Financial Rounds Blog provides an April 30, 2009 mean
solution to this unethical add ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/

Hacking into a professor's computer to change grades of 300 studentsTwo students at California State University at
Northridge have been charged by state authorities with illegally hacking
into a professor’s computer account to change their grades and the grades of
nearly 300 students, the
Los Angeles Times reported. The students told
authorities that they thought the professor was unfair.Inside Higher Ed, July 26, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/26/qt

July 28, 2006 UpdateTwo students each face up to a year in jail for a prank
that involved hacking into a professor's computer, giving grades to other
students and sending pizza, magazine subscriptions and CDs to the professor's
home. Chen, 20, and Jennifer Ngan, 19, face misdemeanor charges of illegally
accessing computers. The pair, both students of California State University,
Northridge, are scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 21.
"Students Face 1 Year in Jail for Hacking," PhysOrg, July 28, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news73239464.html

This type of cheating raises all sorts of legal issues yet to be resolved
for students who might've thought what they did was perfectly legal

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid
$30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the
Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their
scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be
effectively over. On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission
Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site,
Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and
is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information. GMAC said any students
found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the
schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be
permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the
students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy
Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and
we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat,
your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."
Louis Lavelle, "Shutting Down a GMAT Cheat Sheet: A court order against a
Web site that gave away test questions could land some B-school students in hot
water," Business Week, June 23, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2008/bs20080623_153722.htm

Jensen Comment
A university admissions office that refused to accept applications from the
"cheating" prospective MBA students would probably be sued by one or more
students. GMAC would probably be sued as well. But it's hard to sue a U.S.
District Court.

There are several moral issues here. From above, this is clearly cheating.
But in various parts of society exam questions and answers are made available
for study purposes. For example, preparation manuals for drivers license tests
usually contain all the questions that might be asked on the written test. It is
entirely possible that some MBA applicants fell for a scam that they believed
was entirely legitimate. Now their lives are being messed up.

I guess this is a test of the old saying that "Ignorance is no defense" in
the eyes of the law. Clearly from any standpoint, they were taking advantage of
other students who did not have the cheat sheets. But the cheat sheets were
apparently available to anybody in the world for a rather modest fee, albeit an
illegal fee. Every buyer did not know it was illegal.

Question
What should you ban when students are taking examinations? Baseball caps? iPods?

Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious -
students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning
cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers. Nick d'Ambrosia,
17, holds up his iPod inside a classroom at Mountain View High School in
Meridian, Idaho Friday, April 13, 2007. In Idaho, Mountain View High School
recently enacted a ban on iPods, Zunes and other digital media players. Some
students were downloading formulas and other cheats onto the players, although
none were ever caught.
Rebecca Boone, PhysOrg, April 27, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news96865353.html

Smartpen: The Beautiful and
the Ugly
The following invention offers students new opportunities, some for the good and
some for the bad

A new
smartpen could change the way people practice mobile computing by bringing
processing power to traditional pen and paper. Made by Livescribe,
of Oakland, CA, the smartpen is designed to digitize
the words and drawings that a user puts down on paper and bring them to
life.

So long as the user
writes on paper printed with a special pattern, the smartpen transforms what
is written into interactive text. For example, the pen has a recording
function, called paper replay, that can record sound and connect it to what
the user writes while the sounds are being recorded. Later, the user can tap
the pen over what she wrote and replay the associated sounds. "We're
starting to make the whole world of printable surfaces accessible and
functional," says Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff.

The smartpen, he
says, will enable "paper-based multimedia," such as interactive business
cards. Marggraff's business card, for example, allows contacts to e-mail him
by writing him a note on its surface with a smartpen. Users can also access
the pen's power by writing commands on any surface printed with the pattern.
For example, if a smartpen user wants to know the definition of a word, she
can write, "define," followed by the word. The pen, using data stored in its
memory, will recognize the word the user writes and display its definition
on a small screen on the side of the pen. The same type of procedure can be
used to translate words or solve math problems.

"I wanted to make
the pen itself interactive and give you feedback, so that as you're writing
on paper, the pen could interpret what you're doing and then tell you
something about it," says Marggraff. "That opens up a whole new way of
interacting with paper, because effectively, the pen and the paper become a
computer."

The pen's
features depend on its ability to track its position on the paper at all
times. This is largely made possible, Marggraff explains, by the paper. The
paper that the pen uses is printed with microdots according to a process
developed by the Swedish companyAnoto.
The pattern provides gridded location information on a
very small scale. The pen knows its position by taking a picture of what's
beneath the pen tip and processing it based on the algorithms used to
produce the patterns of microdots. Paper replay, for example, then works
because the pen associates particular points of an audio track with
particular locations on a particular page. "If you printed the whole pattern
out, it would cover Europe and Asia in square miles," Marggraff says. "So
when your pen goes down in Southern Italy in a tiny corner, it knows exactly
where you are." This means that a user can permanently link audio
information to particular locations in a notebook, with no worry about
losing the link when she turns the page. Because of the size of the pattern
and the possibilities for extending it even further, Marggraff says, he's
not worried that it will run out.

Pads of the paper
with the special pattern will be sold by Livescribe. Users will also be able
to print the pattern on regular, blank sheets of paper using certain
high-quality printers.

Marggraff
says that the dot-positioning technology,
which he read about in a magazine, was partly what inspired his endeavors in
paper-based computing. Before the Livescribe smartpen, he worked on the
Fly Pentop
Computer, a product for children developed from
earlier applications of the technology.

In addition to the
microdot pattern, the Livescribe smartpen makes use of other technologies,
including a 3-D audio recording system. This technology, Marggraff says, is
designed to make the pen's paper-replay function more useful in less than
ideal recording conditions. If a student using the smartpen gets stuck in
the back of a lecture hall, for example, most recordings would risk being
too low-quality to be useful. The pen, however, uses two microphones to
record the sound the way the user would have heard it originally: the two
microphones help the listener sort different sounds, much as information
from two ears helps people identify the source of a sound.

Rodney Brooks, director of the computer-science
and artificial-intelligence laboratory at MIT, who has been an advisor to
the product, says that connecting writing and computation in the smartpen is
"a real step forward." While Brooks notes that it's unfortunate that a user
must have special paper in addition to a special pen, he is still very
enthusiastic about the technology. "If a magic wand could be waved and you
didn't require [special paper], that would be wonderful, but these are
pretty big steps even without that," he says.

Other
companies have previously made products using the dot-positioning
technology.
Logitech, for example, licensed the microdot
pattern from Anoto to build a digital pen called io. Mark Anderson, director
of business development at Logitech, says that the io employs the dot
technology to allow users to take notes and view them as typewritten text on
a PC, and other similar applications. However, at this time, Anderson says
that the io does not have multimedia functions.

Beyond the
capabilities that the Livescribe smartpen already has, the company is
releasing tools that developers can use to build their own applications for
the pen. Marggraff hopes that the pen will become a new computing platform
for consumers, replacing some existing mobile products.

Brooks says that he
can imagine the pen taking on that role. "People do change their platforms,"
he says.

The smartpen is planned for release
in January, when more product details will be available.

Jensen Comment
Smartpen's audio recorder is good for students to record parts of lectures for
replay later when trying to better understand.
Smartpen's audio recorder is bad when student makes portions of lectures
available online without permission.

Smartpen is good in when the student is
writing and wants a word defined in order to improve the documents.
Smartpen is bad when the student writes "define" in an exam when the definition
is an integral part of the examining question.

Since the smartpen does not work on any
writing surface, the main worry for examinations is when students use smartpen
paper for scratch pads while taking examinations.

Army knew of cheating on tests for eight yearsFor eight years, the Army has known that its largest
online testing program - which verifies that soldiers have learned certain
military skills and helps them amass promotion points - has been the subject of
widespread cheating. In 1999, testing officials first noticed that soldiers were
turning in many tests over a short period, something that would have been almost
impossible without having obtained the answers ahead of time. A survey by the
testing office showed that 5 percent of the exams were probably the subject of
cheating. At the time, soldiers were filing roughly 200,000 exams per year. But
it wasn't until June of this year, when an Army computer contractor complained
about a website providing free copies of completed exams, that the Army
acknowledged that it had a problem.
"Army knew of cheating on tests for eight years: Hundreds of thousands of exam
copies used, Globe probe finds," Boston Globe, December 16, 2007 ---
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/16/army_knew_of_cheating_on_tests_for_eight_years/

I heard the program Monday night on KSTX,
and some of you may find it interesting, especially the first 30 minutes or
so that focuses on academic cheating. Here’s the link:
http://www.lcmedia.com/mind452.htm

In this hour, we explore
Cheating. Four out of five high school students say they've cheated. More
than half of medical school students say the same thing. Even The New York
Times has cribbed from somebody else's paper. Is everybody doing it? Guests
include Dr. Howard Gardner, professor in Cognition and Education at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of a large-scale
research study called the GoodWork Project; renowned primate researcher Dr.
Frans de Waal, professor of psychology at Emory University; Dr. Helen
Fisher, research professor in the department of anthropology at Rutgers
University and author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating,
Marriage, and Why We Stray; and country music group BR5-49, who perform the
Hank Williams classic, "Your Cheatin' Heart."

Host Dr. Fred Goodwin begins
with an essay in which he explores some of the reasons why attitudes toward
cheating seem to be more permissive than ever. He mentions "moral
relativism" in elite education; a media culture that end up making
celebrities of high-profile cheaters like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass;
and the construction of elaborate laws and rules to codify and enforce moral
behavior, which sends the implicit message, "if it's legal, it's ethical."

Cheating among students is
rampant. Four out of five high school students admit to having cheated at
some point. Why is it so common? And why don't more students speak out? To
begin today, we hear from Mary Weed Ervin. She is now a freshman at Duke
University, but when she was a senior in high school in Virginia, she caught
her classmates cheating and did something about it, despite the
consequences.

After catching students in
her AP Biology class cheating, she told the teacher. Her classmates treated
her as if she were the bad guy. She felt even her friends would not stand up
for her, since they continued to hang out with the kids who cheated and
others who outright shunned her. She was insulted by some kids and, after
one party, she was even worried she might be attacked. As a result, she
stopped doing normal senior activities, and she felt very alone. At the end
of the year, though, she was awarded "Senior of the Year" by her peers, so
she knows a lot of her classmates must have supported what she did, even
though they never said so.

Then the Infinite Mind's
Devorah Klahr reports on cheating in schools. Remember when cheating meant
looking over your friend's shoulder? Well, not anymore. Today, many students
use technology to cheat. In addition to buying term papers off the Internet,
they use cell phones, text messaging, and digital computers, sometimes in
elaborate schemes to outwit teachers. "I’m just using my technology to my
advantage pretty much," says one high school cheater. "They gave me all the
tools to do it and I’m just using it to help myself. Because my parents
expect me to have good grades."

To catch these cheaters,
teachers are realizing they, too, have to become more tech savvy. Lou
Bloomfield, a professor at The University of Virginia, created "copyfind," a
computer program to catch cheaters. And many schools use an even larger
search engine called turnitin.com, which scans term papers against a large
database, ensuring that writing is original and not plagiarized. At the
University of Pennsylvania, Michele Goldfarb directs the office of student
conduct. She investigates suspicious looking papers. She remembers a term
paper that was especially obvious. "The faculty member thought the paper was
unusually sophisticated for the student," Goldfarb says, "… use of words
like, 'the pock marked landscape' and 'the steep sided hollows.'
Undergraduates do not talk that way, do not write that way.”

Educators seem to agree that
teaching integrity is the only way to stop cheating. Nobody's going to win
this technology arms race. Elizabeth Kiss is a professor of political
science at Duke University and a board member of the Center for Academic
Integrity. At the beginning of the semester, she tells her students to look
up at the ceiling and think about the trustworthiness of the architect who
designed the structure and the builders who built it. "So I get them to
think about the ways we depend every day on the honesty of other people. And
when people aren't trustworthy, others get hurt."

Next, Dr. Goodwin interviews
the distinguished developmental psychologist and neuropsychologist Dr.
Howard Gardner. He's a professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education and co-director of a large-scale research study
called the GoodWork Project. Perhaps best known for his theory of multiple
intelligences, he's the author of eighteen books and hundreds of articles.
Most recently, he co-authored the book Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics
Meet. A new book, Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at
Work will be out in February, 2004.

For The GoodWork Project,
Dr. Gardner has been interviewing people working in different fields --
science, journalism, and theater -- about good work, which he defines as
excellent and ethical. Everyone he spoke to knows the difference between
what is ethical and what is not, but the disturbing thing is how many people
said they cannot afford to do the right or honest thing if they want to get
ahead in their careers. He says there is a tension between the people they
want to be and the people they think they need to be to succeed.

He says that scientists --
geneticists, in particular -- had the easiest time doing good work, since
everyone wanted the same thing from them, and there was plenty of money and
support for their work. Many said they felt their only limitation was their
own abilities. Journalists, on the other hand, were in a very different
situation. They felt pulled in many directions -- to work faster, to cut
corners, to be more sensational ("if it bleeds, it leads") -- and, as a
result, it was difficult to do good work. As an example, Dr. Gardner
discusses the Jayson Blair case at The New York Times. Blair was caught
fabricating elements in stories, submitting receipts for trips he never
took, and, ultimately, plagiarizing. But, even before these things were
discovered, he had numerous corrections in his stories. Dr. Gardner says the
problem was that he was not chastised, but promoted. He did not have any
kind of deep mentoring -- in which someone conveys the larger purpose of the
work, explains why it is important not to cut corners, and provides regular
support.

In contemporary society,
particularly with the Internet, there are many ways to get around doing your
own work. He says being ethical requires a good, old-fashioned conscience --
even though we might be able to get away with cheating, we need to be able
to stop ourselves because we knows it's wrong and because we would not want
to live in a world where everyone cheated. In such a world, we would not be
able to trust anyone or anything.

Believe it or not, cheating
- and feeling cheated - is not unique to humans. Even monkeys want to be
treated fairly. Dr. Goodwin interviews primate researcher Dr. Frans de Waal,
a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of many books,
including The Ape and the Sushi Master and, his latest, My Family Album:
Thirty Years of Primate Photography.

Dr. de Waal discusses two
different kinds of cheating found in primates. The first, deception, is
generally seen only in the great apes, who are our closest relatives and
capable of the highest levels of cognition. He says that in one chimp
colony, in which lower ranking males were not allowed to court females, he
saw one openly inviting a female to mate (which he does by showing her an
erection). At that moment, the alpha male rounded the corner, and the
lower-ranking male covered his penis with his hands -- hiding the evidence
of his wrongdoing. Dr. de Waal has also seen a chimp try to disguise his
nervousness in front of a rival. Chimps show nervosity by baring their
teeth, and this chimp used his fingers to press his lips together over his
teeth. This kind of behavior requires that the animal be aware of how others
perceive him or her. Chimps end up distrusting other chimps who often
deceive -- they develop methods for detecting cheaters. All this requires
high-level thinking.

Dr. de Waal then discusses
the other kind of cheating -- being shortchanged. He describes a recent
study he and a student, Sarah Brosnan, conducted with capuchin monkeys. They
set up a bartering system with the monkeys, in which they would give the
monkeys pebbles, and then the monkeys would exchange the pebbles for
cucumber pieces. Alone, a monkey would do this over and over again, until
the cucumber was gone. They then put two monkeys next to each other, and, in
exchange for the pebbles, they gave one of them a cucumber slice and the
other a grape, which is much better. The monkey getting the cucumber seemed
to have a very strong emotional reaction. He threw the pebbles out of the
cage, wouldn't accept the cucumber, and basically refused to participate in
the experiment. Dr. de Waal says this illustrates that monkeys have a sense
of fairness. In cooperative societies (whether monkeys or humans),
individuals need to make sure that they are not doing more work than others
for the same reward, or the same work for less reward. He says economists
have studied this in humans, since the reactions can seem irrational -- for
example, a person who was perfectly happy making $40,000 a year may get very
upset and quit her job if she realizes a co-worker doing the same job is
making $80,000. He believes his work with the monkeys may give us clues to
the evolution of the emotions behind this sort of reaction.

To order My Family Album:
Thirty Years of Primate Photography, click here.

Next, we turn our attention
to a different kind of cheating -- adultery. In a special performance just
for The Infinite Mind, the country music group BR5-49 performs what may be
the ultimate anthem for spurned lovers -- Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin'
Heart."

To find out more about
BR5-49 or order a CD, please visit http://www.br549.com/.

It's hard to get an accurate
picture of how common adultery is -- surveys estimate it occurs in anywhere
from 15 to 80% of all marriages. Why do so many people do it? And has
technology redefined cheating? Dr. Goodwin speaks with Dr. Helen Fisher, a
research professor in the department of anthropology at Rutgers University.
She's the author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage,
and Why We Stray. Her new book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of
Romantic Love will be out in early 2004. Dr. Fisher has joined us previously
for shows on Romance and Sexual Attraction.

Dr. Fisher says that she has
studied societies all over the world, and, in all of them, people cheat.
Because it seems to be so universal, she believes there must have been some
kind of evolutionary payoff. Looking back to our ancestors, she guesses that
since, in Darwinian terms, children are the way we spread our lineage to
future generations, a man who cheated might have doubled the number of his
genes getting passed on while a woman who cheated might have either received
more resources for her babies or increased the genetic variety of her
offspring. While none of this was conscious, of course, it would result in
the genes for this kind of behavior being passed on. Dr. Fisher says that
monogamy is not a common reproductive strategy in animals -- it only occurs
in species where both parents are needed to rear the young. But even among
birds, in which most species form pair bonds, there is "cheating." DNA
testing shows 10% of birds' offspring are not biologically related to the
supposed father.

Dr. Fisher then discusses
what she believes are three different circuits in the brain -- one for the
sexual drive, one for romantic love, and one for attachment. She think these
developed to serve different functions. The sex drive evolved so that we
would go after anything at all; romantic love evolved to focus our mating
energy on one person, and therefore be more efficient; and attachment
evolved so that we could tolerate the individual we are with, at least long
enough to raise one child. These systems often interact (i.e. at the start
of a relationship, we generally feel both sexual attraction and romantic
love), but they don't always interact, and that's where adultery comes in.
We can feel attachment for one person while we feel romantic love for
another. This does not mean, however, that we are destined to cheat. Dr.
Fisher says the part of the brain that makes us human is the prefrontal
cortex -- where we make decisions.

In response to a caller,
Jon, who is involved in a very serious email relationship with a married
woman, Dr. Goodwin and Dr. Fisher talk about how technology is allowing
people today to be more secretive about their affairs (hence all the
services advertising they'll catch your cheating spouse). Another caller,
Sheila, says that she thinks that any email relationship (like Jon's) or
serious office friendship that takes time and energy away from a spouse is
cheating. She asks what the costs are to a marriage, even with this kind of
cheating, which is not sexual. Dr. Fisher says the costs are enormous --
instead of building a relationship, you're undermining it. Ultimately, all
three people will get hurt. And although a spouse who is cheated on may get
over the betrayal, he or she will never forget it. She concludes by saying
she thinks forming an attachment to another person is the most ornate and
worthwhile single thing that the human animal can do.

To contact Dr. Fisher,
please write to: Dr. Helen Fisher, Department of Anthropology, Ruth Adams
Building, 131 George Street, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey,
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1414. Or visithttp://anthro.rutgers.edu

To order Anatomy of Love: A
Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, click here.

Finally, commentator John
Hockenberry wonders, just what defines cheating these days? He says, "In the
landscape of American culture, you can find cheating all over the map.
Cheating is that place between triumph and immorality, between out of the
box thinking and exploitation of the unsuspecting. The cheat-free similarly
inhabit a murky place between naïve stupidity and sainthood."

Cheating On Ethics Test at Columbia UniversityCheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But
cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and
all the more so in a course about ethics. Yet Columbia’s Graduate School of
Journalism is looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam
in just such a course, “Critical Issues in Journalism.” According to the
school’s Web site, the course “explores the social role of journalism and the
journalist from legal, historical, ethical, and economic perspectives,” with a
focus on ethics.
Karen W. Arenson, "Cheating on an Ethics Test? It’s ‘Topic A’ at Columbia,"
The New York Times, December 1, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/nyregion/01columbia.html

Thirty-seven summers ago Jimmy Carter spoke to the
nation about our "crisis of spirit." His address became known as his
"malaise" speech, even though he never actually used that word. Webster
defines malaise as an "indefinite lack of health" or "vague sense of mental
or moral ill-being." In order to grapple with problems like the energy
crisis and unemployment, President Carter called on us to examine our
outlook and our priorities.

Public schools have been staggering through their
own crisis for more than a generation. Part of the blame rests directly on
culprits we can see at school: bankrupt education theories and assorted
follies like self-esteem, whole language, and enfeebled classroom
discipline. The roots of the problem also extend to our homes and civic
institutions and appear as children from single-parent families, drug use,
and crime.

These are all issues we should address, but we're
also suffering from an underlying malaise of unsound priorities and
entitlement that's less visible but just as destructive to American
education. Here are a few symptoms of our ill-being.

There's nothing new about classroom troublemakers.
They've been disrupting other people’s education since before chalk was
invented, but today we don't call them troublemakers. Instead, we obfuscate
and invent syndromes for what they do. We say they're "behaviorally
challenged." We turn their conduct into ailments like "oppositional defiance
disorder." According to the psychologist who coined this syndrome, when kids
with ODD have tantrums and refuse to do what they're told, they aren't
"using coercion or manipulation to get what they want." They're just the
victims of their own "inflexibility" and "poor frustration tolerance."

ODD isn't alone in the pantheon of euphemistic,
exculpatory conditions. Horn-blasting, tailgating, and obscene gestures are
no longer just unsafe, obnoxious driving. They’re not even "road rage"
anymore. They're evidence of "intermittent explosive disorder." Remember
that the next time some driver cuts you off and treats you to a one-fingered
salute.

IED also causes "temper outbursts," "throwing or
breaking objects and even spousal abuse," although "not everyone who does
those things is afflicted." How do you tell the difference? Apparently, IED
outbursts are characterized by "threats or aggressive actions and property
damage" that are "way out of proportion to the situation," as opposed
presumably to threats, aggressive actions, and property damage that aren't
way out of proportion to the situation.

According to researchers, a recently administered
questionnaire determined that IED afflicts sixteen million Americans.
Fortunately for the rest of us who have to endure IED tantrums and assaults,
they aren't "bad behavior." They're "biology."

Critics frequently charge that too many high school
graduates aren't prepared for college. The new bad news is that too many
college graduates aren't prepared for life. Universities are responding with
"life after college" programs. These "transition courses" in what officials
term "real life" skills teach college students everything from "managing
their credit cards" and "paying taxes" to "making a plate of pasta" and
"choosing a bottle of Chardonnay."

We're not talking about second-rate institutions.
Alfred University's cooking program includes lessons in "boiling water."
Across the continent Caltech awards three credits for its kitchen survival
course. Sympathetic experts explain that today's college seniors "lack
practical skills because they spent their teens more preoccupied than
previous generations with racking up the grades, SAT scores, and activities
needed to get into top colleges."

That’s ridiculous. My 1960s high school peers and I
lived and died by our permanent records. Claiming that college admissions
suddenly became competitive is like arguing that today's youth need extra
self-esteem because they live under a nuclear threat, a popular
rationalization that conveniently ignores the fact that little kids like me
spent the 1950s hiding under our desks.

According to the Los Angeles Times, "preparing
meals" ranks high among parents' and students' "major concerns." This begs
two questions: Why aren't the concerned parents teaching these skills, and
is learning how to boil water and pay your bills really what universities
are for?

While they may be lost in the kitchen, students are
proving themselves adept in other endeavors. Aided by cell phones and the
Internet, cheating is on the rise at public schools and colleges. In a
Rutgers survey, ninety-seven percent of students polled admitted to cheating
in high school. Even allowing for the notorious inaccuracy of student polls,
the figure is alarming.

Still more alarming, cheating has its champions
among education reformers. One enlightened Northwestern University professor
blames schools when students copy answers, purchase term papers, and steal
exams. He's outraged that students can't copy each other's work during
tests. He endorses plagiarism and objects when a student "receives no
credit" for a paper just because it "was written by somebody else." "No
wonder", he fumes, that students "feel compelled to lie" and put their own
names on work they've "found."

He encourages "honest copying" where students get
credit for copying other people's work as long as they put the real author's
name on it. The professor maintains that allowing this species of larceny
would "reinforce the correct behaviors." Instead of being "punished," the
copier should be "rewarded" for "knowing where to seek the information." In
short, we need to "recognize cheating for the good that it brings."

He's not the only advocate of cheating out there.
The Educational Testing Service's "teaching and learning" vice president
puts the blame for cheating on tests squarely on the tests themselves and
the schools that give them. She holds that it’s "small wonder" that students
"attempt to affect the outcomes" by cheating. She argues that until we allow
kids to "assist each other" during tests, we're "inviting a culture of
cheating."

Let's review. Psychologists are declaring
obnoxious, antisocial behavior a disease. Colleges are teaching adults to
boil water. And educators are blaming
everybody but the cheaters for cheating.

Seven Kansas State University students in one class accused of
plagiarizing papers off the Internet.

A Kansas State University student hacked into a professor's online
gradebook and changed the grades on two examinations that he did not even
take.

70 percent of students at 60 colleges admitted to some cheating within
the previous year (Gallop reported 65%).

Question
Is homework credit sometimes dysfunctional to learning?
If the instructor allows face-to-face study groups, extra-help tutorials,
and chat rooms, what is so terrible about this Facebook study group?

Answer
Apparently its the fact that ten percent course credit was given for homework
that was discussed in the study group. It seems unfair, however, to single out
this one student running the Facebook study group. If the students were
"cheating" by sharing tips on homework, they were probably also doing it
face-to-face. All students who violate the code of conduct should be sanctioned
or forgiven based on the honor code of the institution.

Ryerson U. Student Faces
Expulsion for Running a Facebook Study GroupA student at Ryerson
University, in Toronto, is facing expulsion for running a Facebook study group,
the
Toronto Star reports. Chris Avenir, a
first-year engineering student, is facing expulsion from the school on 147
counts of academic charges — one for himself, and one for every student who used
the Facebook group “Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions” to get homework
help. University officials say that running such a group is in violation of the
school’s academic policy, which says no student can undertake activity to gain
academic advantage. Students argue, however, that the group was analogous to any
in-person study group. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first
Facebook-related expulsion hearing. The
expulsion hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.Hurley Goodall,
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2801&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
My approach was to assign homework for no credit and then administer online
quizzes. Students were assigned different partners each week who attested to
observing no cheating while an assigned "partner" took the online quiz. You can
read the following at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/acct5342.htm

Most every week beginning in
Week 2, you will be required to take an online quiz for a chapter from the
online textbook by Murthy and Groomer. This book is not in the bookstore.
Students should immediately obtain a password and print the first three
chapters of the book entitled
Accounting Information Systems: A Database Approach. You can purchase a
password at
http://www.cybertext.com/forms/accountform.shtml
You will then be able to access the book and the online quizzes at any time
using the book list at
http://www.cybertext.com/
Each week students are to take an online quiz in the presence of an assigned
student partner who then signs the attest form at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/attest.htm
The online quizzes are relatively easy if you take notes while reading the
assigned chapter. You may use your notes for each quiz. However, you may
not view a copy of the entire chapter will taking a quiz.

In trading simulations students cheat just like real-world tradersAt the end of the semester, the number of students
in a simulated trading room who were caught in misconduct or misusing
information for insider trading was significantly higher than at the
beginning. The students said, "You taught us how to do it," Buono recalled.
"For those of us who've spent our careers teaching this, it's been a
disappointing time," said Buono, who has taught at the Waltham, Mass.,
college for 27 years. "Some of the most renowned names in the corporate
world are now jokes at cocktail parties. And they were led by graduates of
our business programs. "That made a lot of us sit up and rethink the
approach of what we're doing."
"Business Profs Rethinking Ethics Classes," SmartPros, June 19, 2006
---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x53572.xml

Question
What's the newest outsourcing trend in student cheating?
This could not possibly happen in the United States (Ha! Ha!)

AnswerIn a unique twist to outsourcing from Britain to
India, students in British universities have been paying computer professionals
in India to complete their course assignments for a fee. The newly recognised
trend, operating mainly through the Internet, has been dubbed as "contract
plagiarism" by British academics who have tracked such malpractices. It is more
in vogue among students enrolled in IT courses in British universities.
"British students outsourcing assignments to India," The Times of India,
June 14, 2006 ---
Click Here

Another Question
If students are outsourcing their assignments, where are they spending their
time?

University of Chicago Cocktail Parties for Educational
Purposes: Don't get drunk or hit on the womenOn Friday afternoon at the
University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business,
students are streaming towards their weekly dinner with deans and fellow
classmates -- all 500 of them. This is just one of the GSB's many social events
throughout the year. They include corporate-sponsored cocktail hours, formal
dinners, mock receptions, and theme parties. While these gatherings may sound
like fun, they also serve a weighty purpose -- getting students a good job. In
fact, for those outside B-school, the experience may sound like a little too
much fun. After all, this is school, not a vacation. But there's a lot to be
learned from the socializing. It's an opportunity to network and scope out your
B-school buddies — and competitors." Careers are a focal point of student
socializing and networking," says Stacey Kole, deputy dean of Chicago's
full-time MBA program.
"The Art of the Schmooze," Business Week, June 12, 2006 ---
Click Here

Twas a situation every middle-schooler dreads.
Bonnie Pitzer was cruising through a vocabulary test until she hit the word
"desolated" -- and drew a blank. But instead of panicking, she quietly
searched the Internet for the definition.

At most schools, looking up test answers online
would be considered cheating. But at Mill Creek Middle School in Kent,
Wash., some teachers now encourage such tactics. "We can do basically
anything on our computers," says the 13-year-old, who took home an A on the
test.

In a wireless age where kids can access the
Internet's vast store of information from their cellphones and PDAs, schools
have been wrestling with how to stem the tide of high-tech cheating. Now,
some educators say they have the answer: Change the rules and make it legal.
In doing so, they're permitting all kinds of behavior that had been
considered off-limits just a few years ago.

The move, which includes some of the country's top
institutions, reflects a broader debate about what skills are necessary in
today's world -- and how schools should teach them. The real-world strengths
of intelligent surfing and analysis, some educators argue, are now just as
important as rote memorization.

The old rules still reign in most places, but an
increasing number of schools are adjusting them. This includes not only
letting kids use the Internet during tests, but in the most extreme cases,
allowing them to text message notes or beam each other definitions on
vocabulary drills. Schools say they in no way consider this cheating because
they're explicitly changing the rules to allow it.

In Ohio, students at Cincinnati Country Day can
take their laptops into some tests and search online Cliffs Notes. At Ensign
Intermediate School in Newport Beach, Calif., seventh-graders are looking at
each other's hand-held computers to get answers on their science drills. And
in San Diego, high-schoolers can roam free on the Internet during English
exams.

The same logic is being applied even when laptops
aren't in the classroom. In Philadelphia, school officials are considering
letting kids retake tests, even if it gives them an opportunity to go home
and Google topics they saw on the first test. "What we've got to teach kids
are the tools to access that information," says Gregory Thornton, the school
district's chief academic officer. " 'Cheating' is not the word anymore."

The changes -- and the debate they're prompting --
are not unlike the upheaval caused when calculators became available in the
early 1970s. Back then, teachers grappled with letting kids use the new
machines or requiring long lines of division by hand. Though initially
banned, calculators were eventually embraced in classrooms and, since 1994,
have even been allowed in the SAT.

Of course, open-book exams have long been a fixture
at some schools. But access to the Internet provides a far vaster trove of
information than simply having a textbook nearby. And the degree of
collaboration that technology is allowing flies in the face of some deeply
entrenched teaching methods.

Grabbing test answers off the Internet is a
"crutch," says Charles Alexander, academic dean at the elite Groton School
in Massachusetts. In the college world, where admissions officers keep
profiles of secondary schools and consider applicants based on the rigor of
their training, there are differing opinions. "This is the way the world
works," says Harvard Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis, adding
that whether a student was allowed to search the Internet for help on a
high-school English exam wouldn't affect his or her application.

Though it might not ultimately factor into a
student's acceptance at University of Pennsylvania, Lee Stetson, dean of
undergraduate admissions there, has a different take. "The definition of
what's cheating has been changing, and fudging seems to be the way of the
world now," he says. "It's not an encouraging sign."

At High Tech High International, a charter school
in San Diego, kids in Ross Roemer's 10th-grade humanities class are allowed
to scan the Internet during some tests; earlier this week, they looked up
what scholars had written about Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
while they were writing their essay exams.

Mr. Roemer says students' essays are better
informed when they can compare their ideas with what others have written.
But he acknowledges that traditionally an approach like this would be
against the rules. "You'd have to rip up their test and call their parents,"
he says. But at this school, which is funded partly by the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, he says there's no sense fighting technology: "You can't
ignore it. You have to embrace it."

When the Kent School District in Washington decided
last year to create a technology "school within a school" at Mill Creek
Middle, where there'd be a 1-to-1 ratio of kids to computers, parents
quickly began pushing to get their kids accepted. Now, teachers say letting
kids look up answers online helps show they can find and analyze information
then synthesize it into a cohesive argument.

In Bonnie Pitzer's case, teacher Becky Keene says
using the Internet helped the seventh-grader, but in the end, she aced the
test because she demonstrated she could also use the word in a sentence. "I
want the kids to be able to apply the meaning, not to be able to memorize
it," says Ms. Keene.

Continued in article

The
techniques vary: Camera phones can be used to create high-tech cheat sheets,
letting students call up photos of key notes they took back in the dorm. A
student also could surreptitiously send a photo of his answers to a friend
sitting in the same classroom during an exam.
Marlon A. Walker (see below)

Diann Baecker thought it was odd that a
student in one of her language classes had left his cellphone flipped open
during a test -- until she started grading the exams.

The assistant professor at Virginia
State University in Petersburg noticed that the student, and his neighbor, had
used identical language to answer an essay question. She deduced that one
student must have taken a picture of his neighbor's essay with his
camera-equipped phone and then copied the answer onto his own test using the
image on the phone's screen.

These days, Prof. Baecker tells
students to put their phones under their desks, along with their books and
backpacks. "The picture phone is the new thing" for cheating, she
says. "Technology just makes it a lot easier. They're not leaning over
their neighbor's shoulders anymore."

A small but growing number of students
are using camera phones to cheat, according to students and educators across
the country. The techniques vary: Camera
phones can be used to create high-tech cheat sheets, letting students call up
photos of key notes they took back in the dorm. A
student also could surreptitiously send a photo of his answers to a friend
sitting in the same classroom during an exam.

Continued in the article.

Forwarded by Helen Terry

Check this out.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/10/19/cellphonejammers.ap/index.html
partial quote: In four Monterrey churches, Israeli-made cell phone jammers the
size of paperbacks have been tucked unobtrusively among paintings of the
Madonna and statues of the saints. The jarring polychromatic din of ringing
cell phones is increasingly being thwarted -- from religious sanctuaries to
India's parliament to Tokyo theaters and commuter trains -- by devices
originally developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and thwart
phone-triggered bombings. In Italy, universities started using the blockers
after discovering that cell phone-savvy teenagers were cheating on exams by
sending text messages or taking pictures of tests.

Use of a cell phone for purposes of cheating during an examination would seem
to be an obvious problem. It just never dawned on me until I witnessed it
in a men's room on December 15, 2001. It was the beginning day of final
examinations. I did not have my final examinations scheduled until the
following week. However, I listened in while a student quite obviously was
asking questions on a cell phone and then waiting for answers.

Leaving books and crib notes in a bathroom or hallway is a common
problem. The cell phone idea, however, just had never dawned on me.
This could be a particular problem on makeup exams. How often have you
made a student leave books and notes in your office and then put the student
alone in a room to take a test? Have you ever thought about that tiny cell
phone that might be in a pocket?

I suspect the next best thing is having a buddy with books and a computer
hidden in one of the stalls such that it is not necessary to make a phone call
to the buddy.

We ban cell (mobile) phones from exam rooms and an
invigilator goes with student to the men's/women's room so as to minimise this
risk. However, I have often noticed some invigilator waiting outside the
toilet facility rather than discreetly inside.

I too bought 52 hand
held calculators from Pic and Save for the use in all my classes. Last
semester I found a student using her palmtop that had all the notes. I have a
container that keeps them in the division office so others can use them. The
bathroom trick has been very well used this semester so I told them for the
final they had to take care of business. I like the comment about when they
leave the room they have finished the test.

I do this to be fair
to those 60% that will not cheat. I have even been thanked by the students
because they felt studied hard and it wasn't fair to have student get good
grades without learning.

I like the idea of
re-developing an honor code. Many times we need to revisit these areas with
the students.

I wish there was a
site we could develop that would keep the instructors on top of the current
cheating techniques. It's like having teenagers. You can save a lot of
problems by being aware of the things they are trying to pull. Anybody know of
a site like that. I know I will visit it before each test.

What bothers me about
all this is the lengths to which we all go to prevent cheating. It is, as a
faculty member here described it, another "1% solution" in that for
the very few who would really cheat, we spend huge amounts of our time, and
restrict those who wouldn't cheat anyway. I used to have someone accompany
people to the rest room, but we frequently have so few proctors that I cannot
spare anyone, and began to feel silly about it, so now I do random checks. I
had never thought of the cell phone thing. I do know that the graphing
calculators provide ample opportunity to cheat, so we have resorted to buying,
as a department, 400 cheap calculators, which we pass out for each exam, then
collect. That restricts that avenue.

We used to check ID,
have not recently. So yesterday (yes, Saturday) while grading I found a
"fake" exam. Really irritated me that someone would waste our time
that way, and I plan to investigate further after we have grades in, with
little hope of success.

We give case exams in
managerial, which are harder to cheat on. And we do allow a page of
handwritten (no photocopies or printed) notes. I always question how far I am
willing to go to prevent cheating, and where I just say, if you are that
clever, go ahead, you'll get your "reward" someday.

What bothers me about
all this is the lengths to which we all go to prevent cheating. It is, as a
faculty member here described it, another "1% solution" in that for
the very few who would really cheat, we spend huge amounts of our time, and
restrict those who wouldn't cheat anyway. I used to have someone accompany
people to the rest room, but we frequently have so few proctors that I cannot
spare anyone, and began to feel silly about it, so now I do random checks. I
had never thought of the cell phone thing. I do know that the graphing
calculators provide ample opportunity to cheat, so we have resorted to buying,
as a department, 400 cheap calculators, which we pass out for each exam, then
collect. That restricts that avenue.

We used to check ID,
have not recently. So yesterday (yes, Saturday) while grading I found a
"fake" exam. Really irritated me that someone would waste our time
that way, and I plan to investigate further after we have grades in, with
little hope of success.

We give case exams in
managerial, which are harder to cheat on. And we do allow a page of
handwritten (no photocopies or printed) notes. I always question how far I am
willing to go to prevent cheating, and where I just say, if you are that
clever, go ahead, you'll get your "reward" someday.

For the final exam, I was assigned two class rooms
across the hall from each other. I went from one classroom to the other,
trying to be random in my timing. I was later told that one gal in the class
room would slide her foot (no stocking) out of her loafer and flip open the
textbook as soon as I left the room. She was able to turn the pages of the
book with her toes. Oh, she did write answers on her exam the old-fashioned
way--pencil held firmly in hand. But what she did with her feet was
remarkable.

No one was willing to take the effort to testify
about her actions when I suggested running her academic dishonesty through the
system. so I had to let it pass without prosecution.

Dave Albrecht

David,

At the end of the course, you should have sent her the following message:

This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy turned the notebook pages,
This little piggy cried F,F,F all the way home.

Bob

I teach only graduate students. And I give exams only
to the MBA introductory accounting students. For MAcc students I grade based
solely on written case reports and class participation.

This year I decided to switch to open book exams for
the MBA students. They can refer to the textbook, their laptop (for lecture
notes), and to a calculator. They can also leave the room to use the rest room
facilities without limitation. I tell them only that they can't talk to their
class mates or use a cell phone to call for outside help (a la Regis Philbin).

I use a combination of multiple choice and short
problems on the exam - about 40% the latter. However, most of the questions
require careful analysis and not just rote memory. Overall, I found that the
test scores and final grades this year were virtually the same as last year.
The students perceived that I made the exams harder this year in order to
compensate for the open book nature. I don't think that is really the case
although I do create entirely new questions every year.

I recognize that most of the messages about this
point (if not all of them) probably relate to undergraduate students so my
experience may not be relevant. But I decided early in my short to date
teaching career that a cheater hurts mainly him/herself and all the policing
in the world is not likely to catch the most creative practitioners.
Communicating a sense of trust seems to have worked well for me.

I would recommend the following to limit cheating
during examinations, particluary for large groups e.g. 40 - 300 ( Here in
:Jamaica, at the country's two leading Universities we may have up to 300
students doing the same final exam!) :

1. Employ invigilators (proctors) with a student to invigilator ratio of about
25 to 1.

2. Designate specific restrooms and have them checked both prior to and after
the exam (even before and after each student's : visit). Have a proctor
accompany students to the door of the restroom.

3. Have ancilliary items handy i.e drinking water, cups, napkins and aspirins
( especially for those who suddenly develop an : "headache" during
the exams).

4. Have all cellphones turned off and left in school bags or left outside of
the exam room.

5. Lend the students University calculators.

6. Have students remove all headgear.

7. Ban all digital watches!

8. Do not allow any pre-written notes into the exam room :

Currently, we do all except 3, 5 & 7 in our
School.

Reply from Jim Richards Down Under

Hi Rohan,
I have been following the thread on cheating with interest. It is good to hear
that it does not just happen at my University.

My comment concerns number 8. A number of others have
suggested that allowing students to take one page of handwritten notes into an
exam is good as it requires them to do some revision and make choices about
what they will fit on the one page.

Several colleagues have tried this but it caused a
headache for the invigilators as students first tried to use photocopy
reductions before we specifically added that it must be handwritten. That of
course means that they now write in very small handwriting to get the maximum
amount allowed on the page.

It also means that the academic who specifies such a
requirement must attend the exam and do the check. The invigilators do not do
it. It has to be done while the students are doing the exam so you need help
from colleagues unless you want to spend all of the exam time checking the
sheets, particularly if they all sit the exam in the same room at the same
time.

Cheers.

Jim Richards
Murdoch University
South Street MURDOCH 6150 AUSTRALIA

Reply from John Rodi

The unfortunate part is that this is a poor use of
scare resources. I believe that cheating is a matter of ethics and if you
cheat you don’t have ethics. Ethics are taught at an early age and the
mechanism for justifying the behavior develops at the same time. I am reminded
of the student who was blatantly cheating in during one of my final exams. He
had simply opened his textbook on the desk and was looking for answers.
Several students pointed this out to me and I told them that I was aware of
what was happening. They didn’t understand what I why I wasn’t stopping
the student.

At the end of the exam I told the student that he was
getting an F for a grade on the final exam since I had observed him cheating
during the entire examination. He replied with remorse—right. Wrong. He said
to me, “If you knew I was cheating why didn’t you stop me so that I wouldn’t
have had to waste all this time!” I was advised that he may have had a case
had he protested, because I could have been accused of providing him with an
opportunity to cheat. I wish that I had made up this story.

John Rodi
El Camino College

Watch Out for Wrist Devices

This is getting ridiculous. In addition to banning cell phones during
examinations, should we ban wrist watches?

The University of Maryland is investigating 12
students for allegedly using their cell phones to dial up all the right
answers during fall exams.

The students are accused of using the "text
messaging" functions on their phones or pagers to receive silent messages
from friends who had access to answer keys for the tests, campus officials
said yesterday.

It is the latest wrinkle in the continuing struggle
between technology and academic integrity. Though quick to jump on the Web and
embrace the laptop, schools across the country have been confronted with the
problem of students using those very tools to plagiarize essays from the
Internet. At Maryland, as at many other colleges, faculty members were stunned
a few years ago to discover that some students were using the same high-end
calculators required for many advanced math tests to retrieve stored
information during exams.

But the use of cell phones "was a new one for
us," said John Zacker, the university's director of student discipline.

The accusations prompted university administrators to
send a memo to faculty members yesterday advising them to monitor the use of
cell phones and other electronic devices during exams.

The incident also highlights an apparent generation
gap in technology savvy on campus. While students by and large expressed no
surprise that cell phones could be used for illicit purposes, Zacker said it
simply had not occurred to most faculty.

Zacker said the accused students are suspected of
exploiting a common practice at College Park, in which professors post answer
keys outside their offices after giving an exam so that students can
immediately calculate how they did.

Some professors, he said, have gotten in the habit of
posting the keys while students are still taking the exam, assured that
students would not be able to see the answers until they had turned in their
tests and left the proctored classroom.

It is unclear exactly how the accused students may
have cheated, Zacker said. But preliminary investigations suggest that they
may have arranged to have friends outside the classroom consult the keys and
call in the answers.

In some cases, professors had posted answer keys on
their Web sites, and officials believe that students may have used cell phones
equipped with Web browsers to look up the answers themselves, while still in
the exam room.

The memo, from Provost William W. Destler, also
advised faculty not to post answer keys until well after an exam is completed.

Zacker would not say which professors or departments
had reported the recent accusations or whether all 12 cases came from the same
course.

The University of Maryland has worked to bolster a
culture of academic integrity in recent years, including the institution of a
new honor pledge that students are urged to sign on their work. The
student-run Honor Council will rule on the cases in coming weeks. First-time
offenders at Maryland generally receive a failing grade for the course with a
marker on their transcripts indicating that cheating was involved, but
additional offenses can merit suspension or expulsion.

Donald L. McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University
who has studied academic dishonesty, said he had heard of other instances of
students across the country using a cell phone to cheat.

Though technology has made it easier for students to
cheat -- and possibly harder for professors to detect it -- McCabe does not
believe that it has tempted more students to cheat. However, he said it may
have increased "the frequency with which cheaters cheat."

"Ten years ago, you'd hear about students using
hand signals or tapping with pencils on their desk," he said.
"Things like this are displacing that. You don't have more cheaters, just
more ways to cheat."

Ever find yourself on a web site that looks virtually
indistinguishable from another? This site showcases such online indiscretions,
making "side-by-side comparisons of web sites that are suspected of
borrowing, copying or stealing copyright-protected content, design or code
without permission." Many web designers have taken unfathomable liberties
with their online filching -- some companies even do it twice. Pirated Sites
uses a cool pop-up window script that makes it easy to compare web sites large
and small. If you think you've run across a site that has been hit by
web-style biters, don't hesitate to submit the URLs of the pirate and the
victim. And if the moral isn't clear, we'll repeat it: Do Not

Plagiarism AlternativesIn a trend that should delight amoral entrepreneurs everywhere, sales of
online term papers are picking up as the school year approaches.
"Where Cheaters Often Prosper,: by Joanna Glasner, Wired News,
August 26, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54571,00.html

The history of the
Internet is filled with stories about companies that tried to make a positive
change in the world and ended up failing miserably.

And then there are
online term-paper sites. Despite inspiring nothing but scorn from educators,
purveyors of collegiate prose are finding life on the dark side of online
commerce quite lucrative.

"They're the
only ones besides casinos or porn really making money on the Internet,"
said Kenny Sahr, founder of SchoolSucks.com,
a free homework site that makes money posting ads for fee-charging term paper
providers. If his advertising customers are any indication, Sahr said, online
term-paper mills are weathering the dot-com bust remarkably well.

With the new school
year about to begin, research paper companies are gearing up for peak season.
It appears academicians' attempts to eradicate these hotbeds of plagiarism
have done little to stifle their growth.

SchoolSucks is no
exception. Although the 6-year-old site hasn't made him rich, Sahr says it
does provide enough money "to pay for my habits" and doesn't require
full-time work. He runs the site with a staff of two, each working out of
their homes and periodically holding meetings on a beach in Tel Aviv, where
the operation is based.

Sahr attributes the
site's longevity largely to the fact that it gets its material for free,
mostly through submissions from students. This keeps the cost of running the
business quite low.

SchoolSucks draws
about 10,000 unique visitors on a typical day and has been growing steadily,
Sahr said.

Meanwhile, traffic to
competing sites isn't slowing either.

"I don't think
we've had a year so far where we haven't grown," said Jared Silvermintz,
college student and co-founder of Genius
Papers. The site, which Silvermintz started as a junior in high school six
years ago, charges $20 for a one-year subscription to a soon-to-be-upgraded
database that he says will contain more than 40,000 papers

I saw an interesting idea on one web site ( http://www.plagiarism.com/
). They offer a product that takes a student essay, replaces every fifth word
with a blank, and then asks the student to fill in the blanks. Depending on how
many they get right and how long it takes them, the program calculates a
"Plagiarism Probability Score." They want $300 for this, but it would
take only a few minutes to write a program that would delete every fifth word,
and it might be an interesting way to get a sense for the likelihood that a
paper was plagiarized if you couldn't find the source. I don't know that it
would be any more effective than simply asking the student to explain key
passages in the paper, though.

I am sorry to say that I have had first hand
experience this semester with cheating. I had six students in one class all
make copies of homework that needed to be submitted by email. All they did was
Cut and Paste and send it from their own accounts. They didn't even bother to
read the homework or they clearly would have seen the obvious typos! I am even
sorrier to say that now that I have started asking other professors I think
there may be a much bigger problem with cheating among accounting majors than
anyone realizes. Since we are putting out future professionals this causes
great concern! I am now working on an Ethics lecture to start my Auditing
class off with next semester and wonder two things:

--Does anyone have any neat ideas (materials) to get
ethical points across?

--Does anyone remember a video (I think it was made
by Andersen) that had example vignettes in it. I seem to remember seeing a
video that had a segment on eating hours and pressure to manage earnings.

Reply from George Lan

I know about the video by Arthur Andersen (then) on
ethics with 5 or 6 vignettes. One of the vignette is entitled " The
Order" and I use it and some of the other vignettes from time to time in
my class. I only have a copy of that video which someone gave to me but
Andersen should probably still have copies. There is a manual that comes with
it. Andersen use an ethical framework to analyse ethical dilemmas, which
consists of several steps (facts, issues, stakeholders, ethical principles,
alternatives, recommendations...)The key is to think through carefully the
ethical dilemma. Some students find ethics issues interesting but I've heard
some students commenting that "they hate ethics."

I still find the story of ZZZZ Best (in "Cooking
the Books" video) has much appeal to the students, perhaps because Barry
Minkow was then a very young guy. I've heard he has a degree in religion
now???

I also use a case prepared by AAA, "The CEO
retires" which looks at the many ways that accounting can be creatively
used to increase the compensation of the CEO in his golden years and the
pressure placed on subordinates to go along.

I believe in the "Nuremberg Principle" i.e.
doing something unethical or illegal because you are ordered to do so does not
absolve you from blame; however, real life ethical situations are very often
like this comment at the bottom of an accounting cartoon " Dammed if I
do, Dammed if I don't." I've also heard that just as people become more
risk averse as they get older, they also believe less in ethics. (Not from any
study that I know about).

My two cents worth,

George Lan
University of Windsor

Reply from Scott Bonacker,

This thread lead me to think of what
is the meaning of "ethics" and "morality", and through
that I found a website for American Sign Language interpreters which discusses
in part their responsibility in their roles.

I am assigning a comprehensive take-home problem to
my managerial accounting course. In order to force students to do the problem
at least by themselves, I am giving different versions of the problem. I
prefer students to do the problem using spread sheet. However, I am concerned
that one student creates the formula for all parts of the problem on the
spread sheet and other students just plug-in the numbers and hand it to me. Do
you have any suggestion how this can be avoided? Most of our students use the
college's labs to do their assignments, with few using their own computers.

Hossein Nouri, PhD, CPA, CFE
Accountancy Program School of Business
The College of New Jersey
P.O.Box 7718 Ewing, NJ 08628-0718 Tel. (609)771-2176
Fax (609)637-5129 Email: hnouri@tcnj.edu

Write a macro (or get MIS people to help) to require
that the students enter their name as soon as they open the spreadsheet. That
name should then be placed in some cell someplace and the column hidden, and
in addition the name should appear in some prominent place (say cell A1), then
the macro should disable itself. You will know where the name is and can find
it when they submit the project. Then just match names.

They can still get around it but some who cheat will
probably get caught.

In the May/June 2002
issue of the Journal of College Student Development, a major journal of
Student Affairs professionals, Scanlon & Neumann report findings from a
survey of 698 students on six campuses regarding Internet plagiarism. Here are
a few highlights:

· 24.5% reported
plagiarizing online sometimes to very frequently (19% sometimes and 9.6% often
or very frequently). This percentage, the researchers concluded based on
longitudinal data on plagiarism, does NOT indicate a sharp increase in
plagiarism over the past three decades, although the percentage “should be
cause for concern.” · Although 8.3% self-reported purchasing papers from
online paper mills sometimes or often/very frequently, 62.2% PERCEIVED that
their peers patronize paper mill sites sometimes or often/very frequently.
Similarly, although 8% self-reported cutting and pasting text from the
Internet often/very frequently, 50.4% PERCEIVED that their peers do so. This
gross misperception is a contextual factor that probably encourages some
students to plagiarize. (This same contextual factor underlies the social
norms marketing [a.k.a. misperception correction] campaign that I’ve
undertaken for several years regarding the incongruity between students’
exaggerated perceptions of alcohol use vs. actual alcohol use.)

Some of you may want
to see the entire journal article. Because the library does not subscribe to
the Journal of College Student Development [Diane Graves, may I suggest the
library subscribe?], I’m putting a copy on reserve under my name so
interested faculty and staff can have access to it.

Collegially
yours,
Richard Reams

My Project Files Got Corrupted (it used to be that the files just got
lost)
I wonder if this will also extend the tenure clock?

Most of us have had the
experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the
attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at
the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part)
as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.

Corrupted-Files.comoffers a service -- recently
noted by
several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that
sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally
corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step
1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2:
E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment'
e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to
notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website
just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"

The site promises that students can stop using
"lame excuses" like the deaths of grandmothers or turning in poor work.

While the Web site attempts to distinguish its
service from cheating, it also advises students on how its services could
make it easier for them to get away with turning in a file they know won't
open. "This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word
file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who's to say
your 10 page paper didn't get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! Its the
perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper.
Cheating is not the answer to procrastination! - Corrupted-Files.com is!"

Who would be behind such an operation? Is this the
latest form of cheating?

Inside Higher Ed e-mailed the site's proprietor via
e-mail and learned the following (obviously not verifiable, and the site
owner did not give a name, nor is one listed on the site's registration).
The site was created in December "as a goof" by its owner.

"I didn't think anyone would actually pay for an
excuse but lo and behold.... It was never meant to sell one file but I get
about 3-4 downloads a day (over 10 a day during finals) and don’t advertise
the site," the owner wrote back. "I used the corrupted file excuse back in
my college days (I’m 25) as I started my first business at 19 so I didn't
have much time to do my schoolwork. When I couldn't get an extension, I sent
my professors a corrupted file to buy me time. I know this was not the most
ethical thing but as a young entrepreneur, I did not have much of a choice
as I valued my employees well above my academics." (People commenting on the
blogs that have noticed the trend note that they have been receiving papers
such as those described.)

Asked if he or she had ever received complaints
from professors that this was cheating, the site's owner said that a faculty
member had asked that question and that this was roughly the answer: "Well
... it's a fine line Prof. H. It's basically just a good excuse vs. outright
cheating. Let's face it, how many times have you heard, 'I had a family
emergency' or 'my grandma passed away?' I am simply offering a better
excuse. It's not cheating in the traditional sense as the student is still
doing their own work and not using a roommates' old paper or being foolish
enough to purchase one online. If the student is desperate, it is fair to
assume he/she has considered these paths. In such a situation, would you
rather have a student make up an excuse and hand in their own work a bit
late or submit someone else's work on time?"

Who are the best customers? "Not to anyone's
surprise, but my best clients are from Ivy and top tier schools. I guess the
more perfect people think you are, the more likely in life you are to cheat
to keep that perception."

One irony that the site developer noted: He or she
gave a guest lecture at a university and assigned a project to students at
the professor's request. "One student e-mailed me a corrupted file -- I
couldn't help but to laugh and accept the student’s excuse."

Why keep the site going? "Everyone at my current
venture finds the site humorous so I keep it up. Plus, it does help students
save face with their professors as CF is an alternative to buying a paper
online or using a friend's old paper. CF simply buys the student time and
encourages them to do their own work and not to procrastinate next time
around."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Students who visit porn sites a log may be giving reasons rather than excuses
for file corruption. One way to fight the file corruption scam is to state (bold
face) in the syllabus that students are responsible for backing up files at
least every fifteen minutes. That way less work is lost if files are corrupted
or lost.

June 6, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

There are various other security measures to consider, because even
trustworthy students may innocently pass along infected files.

In the case of MS Word and Excel documents it is very simple to eliminate
most virus risks by simply requiring each student to submit a MS Word
document as a HTML (htm) or XML (xml) file instead of a doc or xls file.

MS Word and Excel files can also be submitted by students as much safer
PDF files.

For example, open Excel and then click on “ Save as” to see the various
options other than xls.

Of course some functionality may be lost such as embedded macros in xls
or doc files, but these macros are the most dangerous infection sources.

Another safety measure that I used when I was still teaching was to go to
a university computer lab and read student project files and other attached
email files on a lab computer. This protected my office computers. The lab
computers were often more up to date for virus protection, and the
university techies had a daily routine of rebuilding infected lab machines.
Techies could rebuild a lab machine in short time since there were only
“core” system files to be put back on the hard drive. For faculty office
computers there are many more files to be replaced when a faculty computer
machine must be rebuilt.

Four weeks ago I had to have Trinity University rebuild my main computer
that was downed by malware (it was infected by a so-called computer
protection site). I’m pretty good about backup files, but it was much more
of an ordeal for tech support folks and me relative to the simple process of
rebuilding an on-campus lab computer.

By the way, Trinity University still provides tech support on my home
computer only because I purchased it from the virtual Dell Store
administered on the Trinity campus (for a time but not currently). Besides
software savings, the big advantage was lifetime software support from
Trinity.

Shameless plug – If anyone thinks the following
constitutes inappropriate use of this listserv, please let me know:

We market our collaboration software (
www.grovesite.com )
principally to commercial organizations (btw,
Chronicle of Higher Education is one of our customers), but it is very easy
to use and straightforwardly adaptable to class administration and filing
sharing. Student “drop boxes” for assignments would be a piece of cake –
although it may not have the exact same bells and whistles as Blackboard.

If anyone would like to try GroveSite for FREE
through the end of the fall semester, please contact me attom.selling@grovesite.com . Another
way to go about it is to provision yourself with a fully-functional free
trial from our home page. We can then give you a phone tour and set up some
basic pages, including the assignment drop box for you.

Forget about making up stories about sick
relatives. There’s a new way to get around homework deadlines by sending
professors corrupted documents, buying a student extra time because the
professor will likely blame computer errors and take hours or days to ask
for a new version. There are, however, ways to identify the frauds.

Corrupted-Files.com,a Web site developed in
December as a joke, its owner says, offers unreadable Word, Excel, or
PowerPoint files that appear, at first glance, to be legitimate. Students
can submit them via e-mail to professors in place of real papers to get a
deadline extension without late penalties. For $3.95, the site promises a
“completed” assignment file will be sent to the buyer within 12 hours, to be
renamed and submitted by the new owner. By the time a professor gives up on
the bogus file, in theory, a student will have been able to complete the
actual assignment.

“I made CF in 3 hours while watching old episodes
of Seinfeld, so if any inspiration, it was George Costanza, the sad king of
excuses,” the site’s owner, Gianni Martire, said in an e-mail message. “The
site was really all just one big goof.”

Mr. Martire confirmed yesterday that he was the New
York City-based entrepreneur behind the site. He said that he planned to
continue collecting data on Corrupted-Files.com for a possible study, but
that his work as co-founder of Hotlist,
a new social-networking Web site, and on the executive board of Arts Horizons, a
not-for-profit arts-in-education organization, had been keeping him busy.

Mr. Martire added that he didn’t believe his Web
site promoted cheating, since its users are not plagiarizing others or using
an essay mill, but just
buying some extra time.

The corrupted-file idea could work, said T. Mills
Kelly, an associate dean at George Mason University, because faculty members
are often busy with work and grading, and used to getting an occasional
corrupted file. But Mr. Kelly says it would not work with him.

“Every time a student e-mails me a paper, I open
the file to make sure that it will open so I know that the paper is turned
in, and if it doesn’t work, I write them on the spot: ‘You have to send me a
new copy,’” he said. “If they don’t send it right away, my brain starts
ticking over.”

Mr. Mills said that by checking a document’s
properties, anyone can see what computer the file was created on and on what
date, as well as how many times the file has been edited.

“What are the odds that you wrote a 10-page paper
10 minutes before you e-mailed it to me, without an edit?” he asked, adding
that circumventing the system by intentionally using a corrupted file was
cheating. “I always recommend failure for the course.”

It seems a corrupted file purchased by The
Chronicle — which had a glitch and arrived several hours late — would
pass some of Mr. Kelly’s tests, but not all of them: The file’s original
author was hidden, but the creation and edit dates and times were marked for
the time the document was downloaded from the Web site.

After Mr. Martire was contacted by reporters, the
Web site changed slightly. Now the comments section reads: “If you need an
extension, just be honest and ask your professor before you use a corrupted
file.”

Question
How extensive was the University of North Carolina athletics phony
course and grade change cheating scandal?

Answer
Even though I made tidbits about this scandal early on, including that
about 10% of the athletes could not read at a third-grade level. I guess
it never sunk in how many years UNC officials were aware of the cheating
and how many athletes were part of this scandal.

. . . since the 1990s Nang' Oris'
department offered hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never
actually met. Some 500 grades had been changed without
authorization . . .

"UNC officials apologize for a huge sports scandal, while
attacking the woman who brought it to light," Bloomberg
Businessweek, February 3-9, 2014 ---

After trying for years to minimize an
academic corruption scandal on its prestigious Chapel Hill campus,
the University of North Carolina has abruptly switched
strategies---form obfuscation to mea culpa. The apologia comes with
a bitter footnote, though in the form of vilification of a campus
whistle-blower.

. . .

UNC called the police after an
internal university inquiry concluded that that since the 1990s Nang' Oris' department offered
hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never actually met. Some
500 grades had been changed without authorization,
. . .

The first edition of New Bookmarks in
Year 2002 featured sites where you can either purchase research papers or
download them for free. Since many of you are grading or have just graded term
papers, I thought it might be of interest to show how sophisticated these papers
are becoming --- cheating is becoming more difficult to detect.

In the first Year 2002 edition of New
Bookmarks, I will relay a study by a student who used this and other services,
sometimes paying as much as $90 for papers and then examining the grades and
comments written by professors. For an advance view of this study, see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#SethStevenson

Note that most term papers are not free
online and, therefore, will not show up in Web search engines unless some
student was required by his instructor to put his or her term paper online.

You might be able to detect cheating in
a search engine if the clueless student did not even bother to change the title
of the paper (which can be found using search engines.)

On www.research-assistance.com , for example, students can browse an alphabetical list
of categories - Cuba, evolution, or racism, just to name a few - to find the paper of
their choice. For $136, a frantic high school or college student can download a 19-page
paper on "Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt." It can be faxed for $9.50 or delivered
overnight for $15.

Physics students who copy their classmates’ work
learn less than students who don’t plagiarize, researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a
study released yesterday. The researchers created
algorithms to determine when answers submitted by MIT physics students
through a popular
online homework and e-tutoring program had been
copied, then tracked how the serial plagiarists did on their final exams.
Students who copied answers on problems that required the use of algebra
scored two letter grades worse than non-copiers on such problems in the
final, while students who copied more concept-based homework problems did
not fare any worse than their more honest peers. Those who copied 30 percent
of homework problems were three times more likely than the others to fail.
The study recommends several measures that can reduce academically dishonest
behavior, including getting away from lecture-based courses and toward more
interactive teaching methods.

A Waterbury Superior Court judge has ruled in favor
of a New Milford man expelled from Central Connecticut State University in
2006 for cheating. In a decision issued late Wednesday, Judge Jane Scholl
cited a preponderance of evidence supporting Matthew Coster's claim that it
was another student, Cristina Duquette of Watertown, who took Coster's term
paper on the holocaust, not the other way around.

Coster and his family brought the civil suit
against Duquette to clear his name and recoup the over $25,000 they spent
pursuing the case. CCSU officials have said they would reconsider their
decision pending the outcome of the suit but to date nothing has been
scheduled.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
What I found interesting is the fact that the student named Matthew Costner was
expelled for a first-time offense. Most colleges are not currently expelling a
student for the first-time plagiarizing of a term paper.

When Bill was unsure of the answer to a question in a
finance exam last year, he sent a text message on his cell phone to a friend
who was also taking the test. The friend sent him the correct answer.

When Lisa wasn't sure she could remember mathematical
formulas for an accounting exam, she stored them in a calculator with its own
memory, and then used them to help complete the test.

Bill, 21, and Lisa, 22, both of whom asked that their
real names not be used, study business at DePaul University, which has seen a
tenfold increase in reported cases of cheating in the past five years.

"We like to think our students are more
committed than most, but they are not saints, either,'' said Charles Strain,
the school's associate vice president for academic affairs.

Chicago area schools, from community colleges to
universities such as Northwestern, are also concerned about an increase in
cheating.

"It's rampant,'' said Peg Lee, president of
Oakton Community College in the northern suburbs. "It's everywhere.''

Cheating these days comes with an added twist -- new
technology, which in some cases makes it so easy that students don't even
believe what they are doing is wrong. From cutting and pasting text from a Web
site into a term paper to using cell phones or personal data assistants
equipped with wireless Internet access to search for answers while taking a
test, technology is becoming a partner in dishonesty.

And because of increased competition to get into top
colleges and graduate schools, students say they are under more pressure than
ever to get good grades, leading them to cheat more.

Nationally, more than one in five students admits to
cheating on a test in the past year, according to a survey last year of 14,000
students at 23 schools (including one in Illinois) by the Center for Academic
Integrity at Duke University. More than half admit to cheating on a paper.

If you include minor forms of cheating -- such as
working on an assignment with another student when that's not allowed or
asking a student who already took a test what was on it -- three quarters of
all students admit to doing so.

Don McCabe, the center's founder and a management and
global business professor at Rutgers, said the actual number of cheaters is
likely higher because his data is self-reported.

Every indication is that the problem is growing.
Surveys of high school students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in
California found that 74 percent said they cheated on an exam in 2002, up from
61 percent a decade ago.

The fastest growing form of cheating, McCabe said, is
taking information from the Internet and passing it off as the student's own
work.

"Students are more liberal in their
interpretation of what's permissible and what's not,'' he said.

Indeed, neither Bill nor Lisa felt bad about
cheating. Lisa said she did it because professors put too much pressure on
students by making some tests or assignments weigh too heavily on an overall
grade.

Continued in the article

University of Texas at Brownsville Cheating Scandal
Authorities last year uncovered a major cheating scandal at the University of
Texas at Brownsville--Texas Southmost College in which employees, some of them
students, helped other students obtain test answers for themselves or give or
sell them to others,
The Brownsville Heraldreported. The cheating
involved gaining access to the Blackboard system used by faculty members for
tests and grading, among other uses. The university was vague on how it punished
students, saying that university procedures were followed (which would have
involved an F for students in courses in which they were found to have cheated).
Twenty people -- 6 employees and 14 students -- were involved. The university
considered, but decided against, pressing criminal charges. Juliet V. Garcia,
president of the university, released a statement to the Herald on why she
favored internal handling of the matter. "It’s the job of institutions of higher
education to preserve and honor academic integrity. Yes, academic dishonesty is
a challenge that all educators must be prepared to handle," she said. "The
policies and procedures in place at the university provide the means for the
campus to investigate and make informed decisions on courses of action
appropriate for each case."Inside Higher Ed, August 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/03/qt#204832

The inmates are running the asylum
From Duke University: One of the Most Irresponsible Grading Systems in the
WorldHer approach? "So, this year, when I teach 'This Is
Your Brain on the Internet,' I'm trying out a new point system. Do all the work,
you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem.
You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart. You do the assignment
satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there's your grade.
Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the
system. Clearcut. Student is responsible." That still leaves the question of
determining whether students have done the work. Here again, Davidson plans to
rely on students. "Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked
brilliantly last year) so that two students lead us in every class, they can now
also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether
they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down," she writes.
Scott Jaschik, "Getting Out of Grading," Inside Higher Education, August
3, 2009
Jensen Comment
No mention of how Professor Davidson investigates and punishes plagiarism and
other easy ways to cheat in this system. My guess is that she leaves it up to
the students to police themselves any way they like. One way to cheat is simply
hire another student to do the assignment. With no examinations in a controlled
setting, who knows who is doing whose work?

Bob, While I feel the way you do about it, it is
interesting to note that this type of thing isn't new.

In the fall semester of 1973, at the North Campus
of what today is the Florida State College in Jacksonville (formerly FCCJ,
and when I was going there it was called FJC), I enrolled in a
sophomore-level psychology class taught by Dr. Pat Greene. The very first
day, Dr. Greene handed out a list of 30 assignments. Each assignment was
independent study, and consisted of viewing a 15 to 60 minute
video/filmstrip/movie/etc. in the library, or reading a chapter in the
textbook, followed by completion of a 1 to 3 page "worksheet" covering the
major concepts covered in the "lesson".

As I recall, the worksheet was essentially a set of
fill-in-the-blank questions. It was open book, open note, open anything, and
when you completed the worksheet, you put your name on it and dropped it in
Dr. Greene's mailbox in the faculty offices lobby at your convenience.

The first 10 assignments were required in order to
pass the course, but students could pick and choose from the remainder. If
you stopped after the 10 required assignments, you got a D in the class. If
you did 15 assignments, you got a C; 20 a B, and if you completed all 30,
you got an A in the class. Students could pick which lessons to complete
(after the first 10) if they elected not to do all 30.

This was before email, YouTube, and PDF's. Students
worked at their own pace, there was no class meeting whatsoever after that
first day. After the first day of class where I received the syllabus and
assignment sheet, I never attended the classroom again. Dr. Greene
supposedly held office hours during class time for students who wanted to
ask questions, but I never needed it (nor did anyone else I knew of) because
the assignments were so simple and easy, especially since they were open
book, open note, and there was no time limit! There was no deadline, either,
you could take till the end of the semester if you wanted to.

Oh, and no exams, either.

This was also before FERPA. Dr. Greene had a roll
taped to his office door with all students' names on it. It was a manual
spreadsheet, and as you turned in assignments, you got check marks beside
your name in the columns showing which assignments you had "completed". We
never got any of the assignments back, but supposedly if an assignment had
too many errors, the student would get a dash mark instead of a check mark,
indicating the need to do it over again.

Within 2 weeks, I had completed all 30 assignments,
got my A, and never saw Dr. Greene again. I learned at lot about psychology
(everything from Maslow's Hierarchy to Pavlov's slobbering dogs, from the
(now infamous) Hawthorne Effect to the impact of color on emotions), so I
guess the class was a success. But what astounded me was that so many of my
classmates quit after earning the B. The idea of having to do half-again as
much work for an A compared to a B was apparently just too much for most of
my classmates, because when I (out of curiosity) stopped by his office at
the end of the semester, I was blown away by the fact that only a couple of
us had A's, whereby almost everyone else had the B (and a couple had C's,
again to my astonishment). I can't remember if there were any D's or F's.

At the time, I was new to the college environment,
and in my conversations with other faculty members, I discovered that
professors enjoyed something called "academic freedom", and none of my other
professors seemed to have any problem with what Dr. Greene was doing. In
later years, it occurred to me that perhaps we were guinea-pigs for a
psychology study he was doing on motivation. But since he was still using
this method six years later for my younger sister (and using the same
videos, films, and filmstrips!), I have my doubts.

Dr. Greene was a professor for many, many years.
Perhaps he was ahead of his time, with today's camtasia and snag-it and
you-tube recordings... None of his assigned work was his own, it was all
produced by professional producers, with the exception of his worksheets,
which were all the "purple plague" spirit-duplicator handouts.

I've often wondered how much more, if any, I could
have learned if he'd really met with the class and actually tried to teach.
But then again, as I took later psychology classes as part of my management
undergrad (org behavior, supervision, human relations, etc.) I was pleased
with how much I had learned in Dr. Greene's class, so I guess it wasn't a
complete waste of time. Many of my friends who were in his class with me
found the videos and filmstrips a nice break from the dry lectures of some
of our other profs at the time. Plus, we liked the independent-study
convenience. Oh, well...

Bottom line: this type of thing isn't new: 1973 was
35 years ago. Since academic freedom is still around, it doesn't surprise me
that Dr. Greene's teaching (and in this case, his grading) style is still
around too.

"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill,"
by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 ---
Click Here

Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda
Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale.
And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same
scenario has played out many times before.

The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web
sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work
and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.

For the first time, however, those who find
unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal
retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making
its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider
liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site
is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.

Essay mills often provide their own written works.

Holocaust Memoir Turns Out to Be Fiction A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be
a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she
adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles
across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in
self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha
Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles
southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha:
A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted
for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy. In a
statement to The Associated Press, Ms. Defonseca said: “The story is mine. It is
not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to
all who felt betrayed.
Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York Times, March 3, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/books/03arts-HOLOCAUSTMEM_BRF.html

Students cheat. But they cheat less often at schools with an honor code and a
peer culture that condemns dishonesty.

A recent editorial in the Cavalier Daily, the
University of Virginia’s student newspaper, opened with the statement,
"The honor system at the university needs to go. Our honor system
routinely rewards cheaters and punishes honesty." In the wake of a highly
publicized cheating scandal in an introductory physics course at the
university, it was easy to understand the frustration and concern surrounding
Virginia’s long-standing practice of trusting students to honor the
university’s tradition of academic integrity.

We could not disagree more, however, with the idea
that it’s time for Virginia or any other campus to abandon the honor system.
We believe instead that America’s institutions of higher education need to
recommit themselves to a tradition of integrity and honor. Asking students to
be honest in their academic work should not fall victim to debates about
cultural relativism. Certainly, such recommitment seems far superior to
throwing up our hands in despair and assuming that the current generation of
students has lost all sense of honor. Fostering integrity may not be an easy
task, but we believe an increasing number of students and campuses are ready
to meet the challenge.

Did Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz
Plagiarize?Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of
Manchester says the 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the
basic components of calculus - in about 1350. The discovery is currently - and
wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the
end of the seventeenth centuries. The team from the Universities of Manchester
and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi
series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places.
And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their
discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited
India during the fifteenth century. That knowledge, they argue, may have
eventually been passed on to Newton himself. Dr Joseph made the revelations
while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third
edition of his best selling book 'The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European
Roots of Mathematics' by Princeton University Press.
"Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years ," PhysOrg, August 14,
2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news106238636.html

What may be of interest to you is that the above
paper may be downloaded free if you download it before September 30.
My download link was
http://jmi.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/9/4/362
Even though John sent me a copy, I checked out this download alternative so
I could pass this along to you.

This is a very interesting paper on the social/cultural construction of
cheating.

Bob Jensen

Question
It is widely suspected that Vladimir Putin did not read his thesis, let alone
write it. Do some Harvard professors also get credit for writing something
they've not even read?

My good neighbor called my attention to
the article below.

"Chicanery in Cambridge," by Peter
Carlson, The Washington Post, December 10, 2007 ---
Scroll down Here

The magazine 02138 covers
Harvard University
generally in a breathless and fawning manner. But
the current "Sex! Greed! Scandal!" issue contains a
wonderfully acerbic expos¿ that reveals how some of
Harvard's hotshot celebrity professors actually
produce their books: They do it "with the help of a
small army of student assistants who research, edit
and sometimes even write material for which they are
never credited."

Take the case of Alan
Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who seems to
be on TV more often than
Regis Philbin. Dershowitz
has published 12 books since 2000. How does he do
it?

"Dershowitz
generally employs one or two full-time researchers,
three or four part-timers and a handful of students
who do occasional work -- all paid at $11.50 an
hour," writes Jacob Hale Russell. And, Russell adds,
"he also repackages his own work; 'Blasphemy: How
the Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of
Independence,' released this year, is his 2003 book
'America Declares Independence' almost verbatim,
with a few new chapters tacked on."

The funniest -- and most
damning -- anecdote in this piece features Charles
Ogletree, the Harvard law professor who admitted in
2004 that his book "All Deliberate Speed" contained
six paragraphs taken verbatim from a book by a
Yale
professor named Jack Balkin. Here's how Ogletree
explained this error:

"Material from Professor Jack Balkin's book . . .
was inserted . . . by one of my assistants for the
purpose of being reviewed, researched and summarized
by another research assistant with proper
attribution. . . . Unfortunately, the second
assistant, under the pressure of meeting a deadline,
inadvertently deleted this attribution and edited
the text as though it was written by me. The second
assistant then sent a revised draft to the
publisher."

For hundreds of years is was common in
Europe for authors and artists to get sole credit and all the revenues from
works of students. In many cases the students were not even mentioned. Students
were considered extensions of their professors.

I once had a student who plagiarized in
a sense. But it wasn't him. He'd hired one of his employees to write his term
paper. He was then torn as to whether to be blamed for the plagiarism or
accepting blame for hiring a ghost writer. In either case he got the F he
deserved. He and his parents (I had to meet with them) considered suing me for
giving him a failing grade until I showed where 99% of the term paper was lifted
verbatim from three sources.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wal-Mart heiress Elizabeth
Paige Laurie has surrendered her college degree following allegations that
she cheated her way through the school.

The University of Southern California said in a
statement that Laurie, 23, "voluntarily has surrendered her degree and
returned her diploma to the university. She is not a graduate of USC."

The statement, dated September 30, said the
university had ended its review of the allegations concerning Laurie.

Laurie's roommate, Elena Martinez, told a
television show last year that she was paid $20,000 to write term papers and
complete other assignments for the granddaughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud
Walton. Wal-Mart is the world's biggest retailer. The family could not be
reached for comment.

Following the allegations, the University of
Missouri renamed its basketball arena, which had been paid for in part by a
$425 million donation from the Lauries and was to have been called "Paige
Sports Arena."

Three more athletes who say they were scammed out
of an education at the University of North Carolina are now suing over
academic fraud, and the whistleblower who exposed the fake-class system has
now settled her lawsuit with the university.

Former basketball player Kenya McBee has joined
former football player Mike McAdoo's federal class-action lawsuit, claiming
the university denied him and thousands of other athletes education when
advisers forced him to take classes that never met.

Former basketball player Leah Metcalf, and former
football player James Arnold filed a separate but similar class-action
lawsuit in state court in North Carolina.

Ken Wainstein, who was hired by the university to
act as an independent investigator, revealed in October that academic fraud
had taken place at UNC for 18 years, and that UNC officials were wrong when
they denied -- for nearly five years -- that anyone in athletics was
involved.

Instead it was players, like McAdoo, who were
blamed by the university for cheating and punished by the NCAA.

"All of these student-athletes were promised a
legitimate UNC education, were implored to trust UNC academic advising, and
were then guided into academically bereft courses against their interests,"
said attorney Jeremi Duru, one of the attorneys representing these athletes.

Earlier this year high-profile attorney Michael
Hausfeld filed a class-action suit against UNC and the NCAA over the same
scandal. About 3,100 students -- nearly half of them athletes -- who
enrolled in the fake classes could easily join these lawsuits.

Mary Willingham, the whistleblower who began
revealing details about the sham classes, accused UNC of retaliating against
her before she quit last year, and then sued the university to get her job
back.

Willingham told CNN that she reached a settlement
agreement with the school this week, although it had not yet been approved
by a judge. It would compensate her financially but not restore her job as a
learning specialist and adviser.

Book Review of CheatedDark Days in Chapel Hill: If you ran a college and knew there was
substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to educate athletes,
you might cut corners—that’s exactly what the University of North Carolina did
for nearly two decades.

Mr. Smith is a history professor at the University
of North Carolina, Ms. Willingham was for many years an academic counselor
there who brought attention to the scandal by granting interviews to the
Raleigh News & Observer. The authors accuse their state’s prestige public
campus of “broad dishonesty” and of stocking its teams in football and men’s
basketball—the “revenue sports”—with athletes to generate profit, then
breaking its promise to educate them. Ms. Willingham resigned last year and
later sued the school—a settlement was reached this week—and both authors
recount being shunned in Chapel Hill for helping bring the scandal to light,
so they may have an ax to grind. At times, their account flirts with a tone
of “if only they’d listened to me.” Nonetheless “Cheated” sounds an
important call for reform.

Details of the scheme confirm the worst fears about
“student athletes,” at least as regards football and men’s basketball.
(Other men’s and all women’s collegiate sports generally have good academic
reputations.) Some Tar Heels men’s basketball players, Ms. Willingham
contends, read at a third-grade level. (A university official last year
dismissed her research as “a travesty.”) As a student at Chapel Hill, Green
Bay Packers star Julius Peppers failed real courses but got B’s in what were
known as “paper classes,” barely supervised independent-study courses that
required only a single research paper. (Mr. Peppers claims that he “earned
every grade” he got at UNC.) “Cheated” reports that Rashad McCants, key to
the Tar Heels’ 2005 March Madness title, “saw his GPA rise significantly—he
even made the dean’s list—after a semester in which he had done no academic
work.”

Like many large universities, Chapel Hill has a
committee that grants admission waivers to top sports recruits. “Cheated”
says that the committee admitted players who scored below 400 on the verbal
SAT—that’s the 15th percentile, barely north of illiterate—or who were
chronically absent from high school except on game days. There is no chance
that a student so poorly prepared for college will earn a diploma. All he
can do is generate money for the university.

Most of the phony classes described in the report
were in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, under Prof. Julius
Nyang’oro and a departmental administrator. The department had multiple
subject codes for its courses, including AFRI, AFAM and SWAH (for Swahili).
This allowed transcripts to appear to satisfy Chapel Hill’s distribution
requirement, even if most of an athlete’s “classes” were within the same
department. Mr. Nyang’oro resigned in 2012 and was eventually indicted for
fraud, accused of accepting pay for “teaching” that was imaginary. Charges
were dropped when he agreed to assist investigators.

“Cheated” details how Mr. Nyang’oro liked to hang
around with athletes: He was even invited to serve as a “guest coach” for
the football team. Tutors and academic-support staffers also enjoyed
friendly access to the jocks. At football-factory and basketball-power
programs, teachers and tutors who avert their eyes from grade fixing may be
rewarded with courtside seats and sideline passes.

The authors and the report agree that Mr. Nyang’oro
and the administrator perceived that their role was partly to make academic
problems go away so that stars could tape their ankles. University of North
Carolina officials did not want to know how athletes who had barely bested
chance on their SATs were suddenly pulling A’s at a selective college.
“Cheated” recounts two instances when staffers told superiors that football
or men’s basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took
swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who made the
reports.

Last year, according to Education Department data,
UNC–Chapel Hill cleared $30 million in profit on football and men’s
basketball, a number that does not include whatever part of the $297 million
in gifts and grants received by the school last year was prompted by
athletics, or $130 million in assets held by the athletic foundation
affiliated with the college. Some of the gain is expended on sports that
lose money, but football and men’s basketball are still profit centers. At a
prestige university, the African-American studies department became a
mechanism to exploit African-Americans. Players may as well have been
picking cotton.

Across the big-college landscape, around $3 billion
annually flows from networks to schools in rights fees for national TV
broadcasts of football and men’s basketball. Ticket sales and local
marketing add to the total. Meanwhile, the NCAA almost never sanctions
colleges that don’t educate scholarship athletes.

Coaches and administrators make out well themselves
even if their players don’t get educations. Tar Heels men’s basketball coach
Roy Williams and football coach Larry Fedora each earn $1.8 million per
year, according to the USA Today NCAA salary database. Speaking and
endorsement fees for coaches rise with victory totals. Athletic director
Lawrence Cunningham draws $565,000 annually, plus bonuses for wins.

Perhaps the reader is thinking: Why this worry
about diplomas? Don’t big-college athletes go on to wealth in the pros?
Surely starry-eyed teens with Greek-god physiques arriving at the University
of North Carolina, or at any powerhouse program, believe they’re headed for
professional glory in prime time.

Yet most scholarship players never receive a pro
paycheck. “Cheated” reports that the Chapel Hill swindle went into full
swing in 2003, when the school was trying to rebuild its basketball
reputation. Since that year, 54 Tar Heels have been drafted by the NFL or
NBA. That’s less than a fifth of University of North Carolina football and
men’s basketball scholarship holders during the period. And Chapel Hill does
better than most: Broadly across NCAA football and men’s basketball, only
about 2% of athletic-scholarship recipients are drafted. Because a
bachelor’s degree adds about $1 million to lifetime earnings, the diploma is
the potential economic reward for the overwhelming majority of college
athletes.

Of course, athletes have only themselves to blame
for not taking their studies seriously. But many are encouraged by coaches
to believe pipe dreams about the pros, to focus all their effort on winning
so the coach gets his victory bonus. By the time NCAA athletes realize
they’ve been duped, their scholarships are exhausted. Used up and thrown
away, they are easily replaced by the next batch of starry-eyed teens who
believe their names will be called on draft day.

After the Chapel Hill scandal went public, the
school commissioned a flurry of reports, the two most prominent of which
appeared to tell all but were at heart whitewashes. The first, overseen by
former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin, in 2012 declared “with confidence”
that the Tar Heels athletic department knew nothing, nothing: “This was not
an athletic scandal,” the report stated. “Sadly, it was clearly an academic
scandal; but an isolated one.” Mr. Smith and Ms. Willingham write that in
“an amazing display of evasiveness and dishonesty,” Chapel Hill chancellor
Holden Thorp pretended that the Martin report concluded the matter. Later
Mr. Thorp resigned and floated away to the provost’s post at Washington
University in St. Louis. The best-case analysis of Mr. Thorp is that he was
hopelessly incompetent; explanations go downhill from there. Yet he paid
little professional price. If an NCAA athlete commits a petty violation, he
can be thrown out of school. University leaders know that if their schools
are caught systematically cheating, a wrist slap will be their fate.

The second report, conducted by a law firm and
released in 2014, revealed that the first report was a fairy tale. Though
Mr. Thorp denied knowing about the “paper classes,” it concluded that he
knew Mr. Nyang’oro’s department “issued higher grades than most other
departments and was popular among student-athletes.” Why wasn’t this a red
flag? But this document, too, largely exonerated those who commissioned it.
Thousands of students got A’s in fake classes. Yet “the higher levels of the
university” were guilty only of “a loose, decentralized approach to
management” that prevented “meaningful oversight,” even though the existence
of “easy-grading classes with little rigor” was widely known.

The second report attached no blame to basketball
coach Williams, the most marketable figure in Chapel Hill athletics,
reporting his insistence that he “constantly preaches that [the] number one
responsibility [of] coaches and counselors is to make sure their players get
a good education.” The men’s basketball program has seven coaches for a
roster that averages 16—the kind of instructor-to-student ratio normally
found only in doctoral programs. Yet we’re asked to believe there’s no way
the coaches could have noticed that many players never seemed to need to be
in class. Mr. Williams should have been fired for presiding over an
institutionally corrupt program. Instead he was given a pass.

Cheating may have gone over the top at Chapel Hill,
but in collegiate sports, institutional corruption is a norm. The NCAA works
assiduously to change the subject from football and men’s basketball
graduation rates, a straightforward measure that anyone can understand.
Instead it offers Academic Progress Rate, a hocus-pocus metric seemingly
designed to be incomprehensible.

Currently the overall APR of big-college sports is
976 out of 1000. That sounds as if everyone’s nearly perfect. But on this
scale, perfection is achieved if all players have at least a 2.0 GPA. Since
the average GPA at public universities is 3.0, what the NCAA touts as
“academic progress” may equate to significantly below-average outcomes in
the classroom.

But the APR shifts the spotlight from actual
grades. Last fall, Louisville announced to fanfare that football coach Bobby
Petrino will receive a $500,000 bonus for his players’ academic performance.
Sound enlightened? The bonus is triggered by the team hitting a 935 APR.
Since the average for NCAA football programs is 951, academic excellence at
Louisville is now defined down to below average.

Cynicism regarding athletics and education pervades
the big-college system. The networks that are “broadcast partners” (their
term) with the NCAA—ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Turner—have a financial
stake in college sports income and so steer clear of issues like grades and
graduation rates.

Nobody much seems to care so long as money flows.
Steven Spielberg is a member of the board of trustees at USC, where the
graduation rate for African-American men’s basketball players is 25% and 38%
for African-American football players. The reason these numbers are terrible
isn’t that athletes are departing early for the pros—in the past decade,
more than two-thirds of USC football and men’s basketball players were not
drafted. The numbers are terrible because players are used for revenue
without receiving educations. Mr. Spielberg has made two powerful movies
depicting the historical exploitation of African-Americans, “The Color
Purple” and “Amistad.” Where is his movie about present-day exploitation of
African-Americans in college athletics? He need only look out the window at
USC. Or he could buy the rights to “Cheated.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the UNC scandal and the many, many other athletics
cheating scandals at major universities in the USA ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/
We're led to believe that they nearly all cheated at one time or another. The
UNC scandal was unique in that it entailed fake courses and grade changes for
nearly two decades and covered multiple sports and even students who were not
into athletics. The sad thing is that many of the principle coaches and faculty
who cheated moved on from UNC before the scandal broke and are still thriving
unpunished in their careers.

Most of the students now suing UNC were not innocent victims and were
knowingly cheaters. They are victims in a larger sense that they were promised
an education (such as learning how to read) that was denied them in their years
at UNC.

The lawsuit —
first reported by The Washington Post— follows a
scathing investigative report released last October, detailing a
decades-long academic scandal that predominantly affected UNC
student-athletes.

The
scandal centers around so-called "paper classes" —
which typically never met and only required a final paper — that were
offered through the African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department.
These classes were explicity utilized by members of both UNC academic and
athletic departments to help athletes achieve a minimum GPA to maintain
their NCAA eligibility, according to former Justice Department official
Kenneth Wainstein's report.

The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit are former UNC
basketball player Rashanda McCants and former UNC football player Devon
Ramsay. Their lawyers are asking the court to certify the case as a class
action.

"This case arises out of the NCAA and UNC's abject
failure to safeguard and provide a meaningful education to scholarship
athletes who agreed to attend UNC — and take the field — in exchange for
academically sound instruction," McCants and Ramsay's complaint states.

UNC and the NCAA did not fulfill their promise to
scholarship athletes of a quality education and "breached their duties to
student-athletes in spectacular fashion," according to the lawsuit. Rather,
the lawsuit states:

UNC offered dozens of
sham "paper classes" that were designed not to educate but rather to
maintain UNC’s student-athletes' academic eligibility—i.e., to keep them on
the field. And over time these paper classes calcified into a "shadow
curriculum" in which no course attendance was required and no faculty were
involved.

The former student-athletes' complaint also details
how these classes first started.

Former AFAM department administrator Deborah
Crowder began the "paper classes" around 1989, under the supervision of AFAM
chair Julius Nyang'oro, according to the lawsuit. When the classes started,
Crowder "initiated a series of independent studies courses and invited
enrollment from student-athletes" and, even though she was not a member of
the UNC faculty, supervised and graded students' academic work, the lawsuit
claims.

During much of the
Class Period, Crowder managed these paper classes from beginning to end, but
she provided the students with no actual instruction. She registered the
selected students for the classes; she assigned them their paper topics; she
received their completed papers at the end of the semester; she graded the
papers; and she recorded the students' final class grades on the grade
rolls.

When Crowder graded the
papers, she typically awarded As or high Bs—even when she did not read the
papers. Rather, she would typically read the introduction and conclusion and
check to make sure the papers were of appropriate length.

The procedure somewhat changed in the late 1990s,
according to the lawsuit, as Crowder began to register the classes as
lecture courses, rather than independent studies. However, this did not seem
to affect the enrolled students.

"Despite their lecture designation on the course
schedule, these classes continued to operate in the same fashion," according
to the lawsuit. "There was no class attendance or student interaction with
anyone other than Crowder, and Crowder continued to grade the papers."

While these fake classes have been well documented
at UNC, Hausfeld LLP partner Sathya Gosselin, one of the lawyers
representing the former UNC student-athletes, told Business Insider that he
frequently hears from athletes concerned about the quality of their
education.

"I wish I could tell you that the experiences of a
UNC student athletes are not common across many schools, but I hear monthly
from student athletes and their families with concerns about the integrity
of the education they receive," Gosselin told Business Insider. "Its high
time that the powers that be in college sports be held accountable for the
promises they make to student-athletes about their education."

Plantiff and former UNC basketball player Rashanda
McCants released the following statement to Business Insider Friday:

I want to call on all
athletes to stand with me and Devon Ramsay. We must stand strong so that we
can be seen as more than just mere athletes. We are humans; we have voices;
and, although we all love our school, we also love ourselves and the dignity
we built within our own right. My intention is for people to know that I did
everything that was asked of me, on the court and off the court. But the
university and the NCAA failed to keep their promise to me and other college
athletes, and in turn we seek justice. With this said, I hope and pray my
fellow athletes stand with me and Devon in this effort to hold the powers
that be accountable.

In a statement sent to Business Insider, NCAA chief
legal officer Donald Remy said, "We have not yet been notified of the
lawsuit filed in a North Carolina court today. Because we have not seen the
filing, we have no comment."

Adams State University has frozen enrollment in its
print-based correspondence courses in response to
an investigationby The Chronicle
detailing how a former coach helped athletes across the country cheat to
become eligible to compete, according toa statementon the university’s website. Adams State has also
commissioned an outside review of its student-verification process and
canceled a mathematics course mentioned in the Chronicle article.

The article states that the former coach,
identified only as “Mr. White,” helped multiple students at Adams State
cheat by impersonating them online and completing work for them. In recent
years, Adams State has enacted policies to step up the security of the
classes. Adams State’s president, David P. Svaldi, said in the statement
that the new review would “help us further assure academic integrity.”

Pamela G. Powell had a problem. As she administered
a final exam in remedial math at the University of Texas at Austin, she
reportedly spotted a high-profile basketball player cheating.

The player, Martez Walker, a freshman from Detroit,
was allegedly snapping pictures of test questions with his phone and looking
for answers from someone outside the classroom, according to two former
academic advisers informed of the incident.

Ms. Powell, a mathematics instructor who had
several athletes in her class that semester, the fall of 2013, contacted
Adam Creasy, her liaison with the athletic department. The instructor asked
what she should do, recalled Mr. Creasy, then an academic counselor for the
football team. He spoke with Brian Davis, then head of academic support for
football, who advised the instructor to talk with Randa Ryan, executive
senior associate athletic director for student services.

What happened next is unclear.

But Mr. Walker passed the class, according to Mr.
Creasy. Soon after, the player was named to the
Big 12 Commissioner’s Honor Roll, for earning at
least a 3.0 grade-point average. That season Mr. Walker became a key
contributor to the team, scoring in double figures seven times, including a
season-high 16 points in an NCAA tournament win against Arizona State
University.

Mr. Walker, who has since transferred to Oakland
University, in Michigan, where he is expected to play basketball this
season, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He withdrew from
Texas last fall, after he was arrested and suspended from the team following
allegations that he had assaulted his girlfriend.

The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of several
new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes, illustrate how
the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the
limits of its policy on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its
teams' academic records.

Continued in article

Jensen Question
Are there any NCAA Division 1 universities without academic scandals involving
athletes? Perhaps BYU, some Ivy-type universities, and the military
academies. That's about it as far as I can tell. These universities have an
edge. They require reading, writing, and arithmetic before admitting athletes.
And yes, some athletic department majors are much easier than basket weaving.

The state decided to investigate cheating in the
public schools after an analysis of test results by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution found suspiciously high gains in math and reading
proficiency. “A miracle occurred at Atherton Elementary this summer, if its
standardized math test scores are to be believed,” the paper reported in
2008. “Half of the DeKalb County school’s fifth-graders failed a yearly
state test in the spring. When the 32 students took retests, not only did
every one of them pass—26 scored at the highest level.”

The suspicion was warranted. A subsequent 400-page
report issued by the state in 2011 found that 44 of 56 investigated schools
had falsified results on state exams. The cheating was “widespread and
organized” and conducted “with the tacit knowledge and even approval of
high-level administrators.” According to investigators, Atlanta Public
Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall and her aides allowed “cheating—at all
levels—to go unchecked for years.” Teachers would gather at so-called
“erasure” parties to correct answers on exams and inflate scores. Some 178
public-school employees, including 34 principals, were implicated.
Thirty-five of them were eventually indicted by a grand jury, and 21 reached
plea agreements. Hall maintained her innocence but died before she could
stand trial.

The reaction to these shenanigans from defenders of
the public-education status quo has been sad but not at all surprising. Yes,
the teachers were wrong to falsify scores and set up students to fail by
promoting them to the next grade unprepared. But if you are Randi
Weingarten, who heads the powerful American Federation of Teachers (AFT),
the real victims are your union members. For Ms. Weingarten, a strong
opponent of the testing requirements included in the No Child Left Behind
education law signed by President Bush, the Atlanta scandal “crystallizes
the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”

Lily Eskelsen García, who is president of the AFT’s
sister union, the National Education Association (NEA), wrote in a
Journal-Constitution op-ed at the start of the trial that “too often, and in
too many places, we have turned the time-tested practice of teach, learn and
test into a system of test, blame and punish.” She added: “We are using
these tests to punish schools, teachers, students and school districts. This
simply isn’t right. It is toxic.”

. . .

In 2011 an investigation by a local television
station in Atlanta, WSB-TV, revealed that more than 700 teachers in Georgia
had repeatedly failed at least one portion of a test they must pass before
receiving a teaching certificate. Nearly 60 teachers failed the test at
least 10 times, and “there were 297 teachers on the payrolls of metro
Atlanta school systems in the past three years after having failed the state
certification test five times or more.”

Would you want your child taught by someone who
flunked the certification test five times, let alone 10? And would that
instructor be more or less likely to resort to changing student test scores
to hide his own incompetence?

The eagerness to blame No Child Left Behind’s
accountability provisions for these cheating scandals is off-base. The law
has its flaws, including an overly stringent method of judging a school’s
performance, but those flaws aren’t fatal. The much bigger problem is the
one exposed by WSB-TV. Long before Mr. Bush signed NCLB, public-school
teaching was attracting the least-qualified students from universities. For
decades, the test scores of people who enter teaching have trailed those of
people entering other professions, and research by Stanford economist Eric
Hanushek and others shows that the trend has worsened in recent years.

Moreover, brighter college students who do want to
teach for a few years after graduation, via highly selective programs such
as Teach for America, are scorned by the education establishment as
insufficiently committed to the profession. Among other things, Atlanta’s
cheating scandal is a byproduct of who goes into teaching.

Philadelphia's public school system has joined
several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and
Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized
academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school
principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and
administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of
the nation's largest cheating scandals." (1/23/14) (http://tinyurl.com/q5makm3).
Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the
students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some
cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia
Federation of Teachers, identifies the problem as district officials
focusing too heavily on test scores to judge teacher performance, and
they've converted low-performing schools to charters run by independent
groups that typically hire nonunion teachers. But William Hite,
superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, said cheating by
adults harms students because schools use test scores to determine which
students need remedial help, saying, "There is no circumstance, no matter
how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students."

While there's widespread teacher test cheating to
conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it's just the
tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress,
published by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for
Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation's Report Card,
measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46
percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent
scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to
demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for
proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.
It's a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent
basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the
state of Pennsylvania's 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are
in Philadelphia.

Jensen Comment
It's possible to estimate the number of students who took fake classes (the
media is reporting 3,100 students over 20 years) at the University of North
Carolina. But we will probably never know the number of students who forged
grade change slips for legitimate courses.

Jensen Comment
My accounting background makes me think first about internal control. UNC
apparently had no internal control over grade changes. For example, when I
taught at Trinity University a grade change form had four carbon copies that I
submitted to the registrars office. When the student's grade was changed one of
those copies I signed was returned to me.

At UNC the Afro-American Studies Department left grade change forms where
students could get blank copies and forge instructor signatures for virtually
any courses on campus. Apparently a copy of a grade change form was not sent
back to an instructor who would then realize that somebody had forged his or her
signature. UNC gets an F on internal control, and nobody should change that
grade!

Yeah Right! Wink! Wink!
What is unbelievable is that UNC said this went on for 20 years without coaches,
higher administrative officials, and 99.9% of the faculty being aware that
thousands of students were cheating, only about half of them being athletes.

The 2012 report cleared the UNC athletics
department of any involvement in the athletes' grade inflation.

This no longer seems to be the case. According to
The News & Observer, Wednesday's report "found
a new culprit: the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes ... The
report describes a fairly broad group of academic and athletic officials who
knew about athletes getting better grades in classes that only required
papers, yet taking little or no action."

Additionally,
student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel reports, the
new report "found clear evidence that academic counselors from the football,
men's basketball and women's basketball teams asked for players to be
enrolled in bogus independent study classes in order for them to be
eligible."

The more recent investigation was led by Kenneth
Wainstein, a former U.S. Justice Department official. Wainstein reportedly
had an unprecedented level of access to material related to the UNC scandal,
as well as the cooperation of former African studies chairman Julius
Nyang'oro and department administrator Deborah Crowder.

Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers who don't
resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes took fake courses
and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just contend that these athletes
did not suffer academically because they were in the wonderful learning
environment of the University of North Carolina. Yeah Right!

The corruption of
academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could
turn into the most revelatory of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in
recent memory. Beginning three years ago with what sounded like
garden-variety reports of under-the-table payments from agents and improper
classroom help for athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include
evidence of hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and faculty
signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite
basketball and football players academically eligible to play.

After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in
this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider
attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reportingalready done by the News &
Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.

The rot in Chapel Hill
undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest public
institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes that did not
meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is needed. There’s also the
particularly pernicious way that the school’s African and Afro-American
Studies Department has been used to inflate the GPAs of basketball and
football players. The corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black
history and culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of
college athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion.
(UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)

Another reason Chapel Hill
requires sustained investigation is the manner in which the athletic and
academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the National Collegiate Athletic
Association, have so far whitewashed the scandal. Officials have repeatedly
denied that the fiasco’s roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name
of coddling a disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has
left many students intellectually crippled.

Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead
investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more
power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task
for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state
disloyalty. As hewrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to
connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I
can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective.
Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are
already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the
story. Keep those e-mails coming.

One source of insight is Jay
Smith, a professor of early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar
who understands the university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a
powerful distaste for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal.
“What’s going on here is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because
it’s emblematic of what I think goes on at major universities all across the
country,” where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.

Smith has the best sort of
self-interested motivation for making sense of what has happened on his
campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess, based in part on
statistics and personal experiences proffered by UNC instructors assigned
over the years to assist varsity athletes. To me that sounds like a
page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO movie.

I asked Smith what he thinks
is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the local district
attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am chairman, Nyang’oro, was
indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim Woodall told the News &
Observer that a second person is also under investigation and could be
indicted soon. Woodall did not identify the second target, except to say the
person is not someone who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have
identified Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as
being involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to comment
publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t return my e-mail
inquiry.

The indictment of Crowder, a
relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack open the case. It
defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant would have operated a rogue
department without the knowledge of more senior faculty members, if not top
university administrators. It further defies reason that this pair would
have created phony classes for athletes without the urging and participation
of people in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going
to have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.

Even before that
happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned whistle-blowers are
likely to go public and start naming names if they think the powers that be
are planning to isolate Crowder and Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This
thing goes much higher, and there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.

Rashad McCants, the second-leading scorer on the
University of North Carolina's 2004-05 basketball team that won the national
championship,
told ESPN's "Outside the Lines" that he rarely
attended class, turned in papers written entirely by tutors, and took bogus
courses in the African-American Studies department during his three years in
Chapel Hill.

"I didn't write any papers," McCants said. "When it
was time to turn in our papers for our paper classes, we would get a call
from our tutor ... carpool over to the tutor's house and basically get our
papers and go about our business."

During the spring term of 2005, McCants says he
made the Dean's List and got straight-A's in four classes that he never
attended.

When asked if UNC men's basketball coach Roy
Williams knew about this, McCants told Outside The Lines, "I think he knew
100%. ... It was something that was a part of the program."

Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers who don't
resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes took fake courses
and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just contend that these athletes
did not suffer academically because they were in the wonderful learning
environment of the University of North Carolina. Yeah Right!

The corruption of
academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could
turn into the most revelatory of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in
recent memory. Beginning three years ago with what sounded like
garden-variety reports of under-the-table payments from agents and improper
classroom help for athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include
evidence of hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and faculty
signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite
basketball and football players academically eligible to play.

After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in
this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider
attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reportingalready done by the News &
Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.

The rot in Chapel Hill
undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest public
institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes that did not
meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is needed. There’s also the
particularly pernicious way that the school’s African and Afro-American
Studies Department has been used to inflate the GPAs of basketball and
football players. The corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black
history and culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of
college athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s
former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been criminally
indicted for fraud.)

Another reason Chapel Hill
requires sustained investigation is the manner in which the athletic and
academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the National Collegiate Athletic
Association, have so far whitewashed the scandal. Officials have repeatedly
denied that the fiasco’s roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name
of coddling a disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has
left many students intellectually crippled.

Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead
investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more
power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task
for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state
disloyalty. As hewrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to
connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I
can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective.
Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are
already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the
story. Keep those e-mails coming.

One source of insight is Jay
Smith, a professor of early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar
who understands the university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a
powerful distaste for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal.
“What’s going on here is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because
it’s emblematic of what I think goes on at major universities all across the
country,” where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.

Smith has the best sort of
self-interested motivation for making sense of what has happened on his
campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess, based in part on
statistics and personal experiences proffered by UNC instructors assigned
over the years to assist varsity athletes. To me that sounds like a
page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO movie.

I asked Smith what he thinks
is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the local district
attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am chairman, Nyang’oro, was
indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim Woodall told the News &
Observer that a second person is also under investigation and could be
indicted soon. Woodall did not identify the second target, except to say the
person is not someone who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have
identified Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as
being involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to comment
publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t return my e-mail
inquiry.

The indictment of Crowder, a
relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack open the case. It
defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant would have operated a rogue
department without the knowledge of more senior faculty members, if not top
university administrators. It further defies reason that this pair would
have created phony classes for athletes without the urging and participation
of people in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going
to have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.

Even before that
happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned whistle-blowers are
likely to go public and start naming names if they think the powers that be
are planning to isolate Crowder and Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This
thing goes much higher, and there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.

Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers who don't
resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes took fake courses
and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just contend that these athletes
did not suffer academically because they were in the wonderful learning
environment of the University of North Carolina. Yeah Right!

The corruption
of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill
campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the
undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three
years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of
hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and
faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate
campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically
eligible to play.

After
belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story
deserves wider attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reportingalready done by the
News & Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of
North Carolina.

The rot in Chapel
Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest
public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes
that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is
needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used
to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The
corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and
culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college
athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s
former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)

Another reason
Chapel Hill requires sustained investigation is the manner in which
the athletic and academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the
National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far whitewashed
the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left
many students intellectually crippled.

Dan Kane, the
News & Observer‘s lead investigative reporter, does
old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more power to him. Digging
up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task for which Kane
has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state disloyalty.
As hewrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed
to connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and
months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some
long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local
people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s
part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails
coming.

One source of
insight is Jay Smith, a professor of early modern French history at
UNC. A serious scholar who understands the university’s sports-happy
culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste for the way his
employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here is so
important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of
what I think goes on at major universities all across the country,”
where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.

Smith has the best
sort of self-interested motivation for making sense of what has
happened on his campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess,
based in part on statistics and personal experiences proffered by
UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist varsity athletes.
To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO
movie.

I asked Smith what
he thinks is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the
local district attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am
chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim
Woodall told the News & Observer that a second person is
also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did not
identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone
who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified
Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being
involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to
comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t
return my e-mail inquiry.

The indictment of
Crowder, a relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack
open the case. It defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant
would have operated a rogue department without the knowledge of more
senior faculty members, if not top university administrators. It
further defies reason that this pair would have created phony
classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people
in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to
have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.

Even before
that happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned
whistle-blowers are likely to go public and start naming names if
they think the powers that be are planning to isolate Crowder and
Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.

David Tovar
represented himself as a graduate of the University of Delaware but in fact
had no such degree

In the middle of a probe over alleged corruption in
its international division, Walmart has caught its own spokesman in a lie.

David Tovar, Walmart’s vice president of
communications, and the company’s spokesperson as it responds to allegations
that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has said he is
leaving the jobhe has held since 2006, Bloomberg
reports.

Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., resigned
Wednesday after university officials discovered she had fabricated her
academic credentials.

Jones’ resume stated that she had earned degrees
from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Union College and Albany Medical
College, but MIT administrators said these were all false claims. After
receiving a phone call last week suggesting that the university investigate
Jones’ credentials, MIT officials determined that Jones had misrepresented
her academic record. Jones, whose resignation was effective immediately,
worked at MIT for 28 years and had acted as dean of admissions since 1997.

Senior Associate Director of Admissions Stuart
Schmill will act as interim director of admissions, and a search for a new
dean of admissions will begin presently, MIT Dean for Undergraduate
Education Daniel Hastings said in an e-mail to the MIT community Wednesday.

Jones issued a statement explaining that she had
falsified her resume when she first applied for a lower-level position at
the university.

Philadelphia's public school system has joined
several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and
Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized
academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school
principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and
administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of
the nation's largest cheating scandals." (1/23/14) (http://tinyurl.com/q5makm3).
Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the
students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some
cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia
Federation of Teachers, identifies the problem as district officials
focusing too heavily on test scores to judge teacher performance, and
they've converted low-performing schools to charters run by independent
groups that typically hire nonunion teachers. But William Hite,
superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, said cheating by
adults harms students because schools use test scores to determine which
students need remedial help, saying, "There is no circumstance, no matter
how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students."

While there's widespread teacher test cheating to
conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it's just the
tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress,
published by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for
Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation's Report Card,
measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46
percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent
scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to
demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for
proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.
It's a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent
basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the
state of Pennsylvania's 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are
in Philadelphia.

The trial began this week in a lawsuit in Los
Angeles Superior Court aimed at bringing meaningful and badly needed change
to California's public schools. The suit could have far-reaching effects in
American education—in particular on teacher-tenure policies that too often
work to the detriment of students.

I am among the lawyers representing nine brave
schoolchildren, ages 7 to 17, in Vergara v. California. Our arguments are
premised on what the California Supreme Court said more than 40 years ago:
that education is "the lifeline of both the individual and society," serving
the "distinctive and priceless function" as "the bright hope for entry of
poor and oppressed into the mainstream of American society." Every child,
the court held in Serrano v. Priest, has a fundamental right under the
California Constitution to equal educational opportunities.

We will introduce evidence and testimony that the
California school system is violating the rights of students across the
state. While most teachers are working hard and doing a good job, California
law compels officials to leave some teachers in the classroom who are known
to be grossly ineffective.

Because of existing laws, some of the state's best
teachers—including "teachers of the year"—are routinely laid off because
they lack seniority. In other cases, teachers convicted of heinous crimes
receive generous payoffs to go away because school districts know that there
is slim hope of dismissing them. California law makes such firings virtually
impossible. The system is so irrational that it compels administrators to
bestow "permanent employment"—lifetime tenure—on individuals before they
even finish their new-teacher training program or receive teaching
credentials.

As a result of this nonsensical regime, certain
students get stuck with utterly incompetent or indifferent teachers,
resulting in serious harm from which the students may never recover. Such
arbitrary, counterproductive rules would never be tolerated in any other
business. They should especially not be tolerated where children's futures
are at stake.

But in California, as in other states, outdated
laws, entrenched political interests, and policy gridlock have thwarted
legislative solutions meant to protect public-school students, who are not
old enough to vote and are in essence locked out of the political process.
That is why our plaintiffs decided to take a stand and bring this lawsuit
asserting their state constitutional rights.

Through this lawsuit, we are seeking to strike down
five state laws:

• The "last-in, first-out" or LIFO law, which
demoralizes teachers by reducing them to numbers based on their start date,
and forces schools to lay off the most junior teachers no matter how
passionate and successful they are at teaching students.

• The "permanent employment" law, which forces
school districts to make an irreversible commitment to keep teachers until
retirement a mere 18 months after the teachers' first day on the job—long
before the districts can possibly make such an informed decision.

• Three "dismissal" laws that together erect
unnecessary and costly barriers to terminating a teacher based on poor
performance or misconduct. Out of 275,000 teachers statewide, only two
teachers are dismissed each year on average for poor performance. In Los
Angeles, it costs an average of between $250,000 and $450,000 in legal and
other costs, and takes more than four years to dismiss a single teacher.
Even without these laws, ample protections exist for protecting public
employees—including teachers—from improper dismissal.

By forcing some students into classrooms with
teachers unable or unwilling to teach, these laws are imposing substantial
harm. One of our experts, Harvard economist Raj Chetty, recently analyzed
the school district data and anonymous tax records of more than 2.5 million
students in a large urban school district in the Northeast over a 20-year
period.

He found that students taught by a single highly
ineffective teacher experience a nearly 3% reduction in expected lifetime
earnings. They also have a lower likelihood of attending college and an
increased risk of teenage pregnancy compared with students taught by average
teachers. He also conducted a study showing that laying off the least
effective instead of the least experienced teachers would increase the total
lifetime earnings of a single classroom of Los Angeles students by
approximately $2.1 million.

Even worse, the data show that many of the least
effective teachers tend to end up in schools serving predominantly
low-income and minority communities. Thus these laws are exacerbating the
very achievement gap that education is supposed to ameliorate. For example,
a recent study of the Los Angeles Unified School District found that
African-American and Hispanic students are 43% and 68% more likely,
respectively, than white students to be taught by a highly ineffective
teacher. This disparity is the equivalent of losing a month or more of
school every year.

The California teachers unions are opposed to the
goals of our lawsuit and have intervened to help the state of California
defend these harmful laws. But the unions do not speak for all teachers. We
have heard from hundreds of teachers since we filed the case in May 2012.
These are teachers who don't want to be treated like a faceless seniority
number, and who don't want to be laid off just because they started teaching
three days after the ineffective, tenured teacher next door. Some of them
will testify during the trial.

Continued in article

From Infobits on November 29, 2001

"Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just
Teach" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 48, issue 12,
November 16, 2001, p. B24) by Rebecca Moore Howard, associate professor of
writing and rhetoric, and director of the writing program, at Syracuse
University.

Howard argues that "[i]n our stampede to fight
what The New York Times calls a 'plague' of plagiarism, we risk becoming the
enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the
student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship. Further,
by thinking of plagiarism as a unitary act rather than a collection of
disparate activities, we risk categorizing all of our students as criminals.
Worst of all, we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. Big
reform." The article is online to CHE subscribers athttp://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i12/12b02401.htm

Jensen Comment
I can't buy this argument. It would bother my conscience too much to give a
higher grade to a student that I strongly suspect has merely copied the
arguments elsewhere than the grade given to a student who tried to develop his
or her own arguments. How can Professor Howard in good conscience give a higher
grade to the suspected plagiarist? This rewards "street smart" at the
expense of "smart." It also advocates becoming more street smart at
the expense of real learning.

I might be cynical here and hope that Professor Howard's physicians graduated
from medical schools who passed students on the basis of being really good
copiers of papers they could not comprehend.

What is not mentioned in the quote above is the labor-union-style argument
also presented by Professor Howard in the article. She argues that we're
already to overworked to have the time to investigate suspected
plagiarism. Is refusing to investigate really being professional as an
honorable academic?

The University of Illinois at Chicago is reviewing
the dissertation of Chicago State University’s interim provost, Angela
Henderson, amid allegations that parts of it were plagiarized, the
Chicago Tribunereported. Ms. Henderson, who
became who became interim provost in July, received her Ph.D. in nursing
from Illinois-Chicago in August.

The investigation began last month after a
professor at Chicago State raised concerns that parts of the document were
copied from other sources without proper attribution or with inadequate
citation. A faculty committee of the UIC Graduate College has reviewed the
investigation’s findings and has made a confidential recommendation to Karen
J. Colley, dean of the college. She is expected to decide this week whether
any further action is warranted, a university spokesman said.

The plagiarism charge was first brought by Robert
Bionaz, an associate professor of history at Chicago State who is among a
group of faculty members who operate a blog that has criticized Ms.
Henderson and the university’s president, Wayne D. Watson, among other
administrators. The blog has twice
received lettersfrom a university lawyer,
most recentlyon January 3, demanding that it
remove images and references to Chicago State and even change its domain
name,
csufacultyvoice.blogspot.com.

A former professor at the center of an academic
scandal involving athletes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill has been charged with a felony, accused of receiving $12,000 in payment
for a lecture course in which he held no classes.

A grand jury on Monday indicted Julius Nyang'Oro
with a single felony count of obtaining property by false pretenses.

Nyang'Oro was chairman of the Department of African
and Afro-American Studies. He resigned from that post in 2011 during a
campus investigation that found certain classes in the department that
instructors did not teach, undocumented grade changes and faked faculty
signatures on some grade reports.

The scandal contributed to the departure of
football coach Butch Davis and the resignation of a former chancellor,
Holden Thorp.

Nyang'Oro, who retired in 2012, could face up to 10
months in prison if convicted. The university said it recouped the $12,000
from his final paycheck.

Calls to two numbers listed for Nyang'Oro rang
busy. A man answering a call to a third number for Nyang'Oro on indictment
documents hung up without comment and follow-up messages weren't returned.

Orange County District Attorney James Woodall said
the professor's 2011 summer course was supposed to have had regular class
meetings. But he said Nyang'oro instead ran an independent study class that
required students to write papers but not show up. The school found that the
course, a late addition to the schedule, had an enrollment of 18 football
players and one former football player.

A campus investigation into academic fraud released
last year blamed the scandal solely on Nyang'oro and a department
administrator who also has since retired. The probe led by former Gov. Jim
Martin concluded that alleged fraud didn't involve other faculty or members
of the athletic department.

Martin, a former college chemistry professor, was
aided by consultants with experience in academic investigations. After
shortcomings of the report's method were highlighted, Martin and university
officials said they lacked the subpoena powers of State Bureau of
Investigation, or SBI, to force people to answer questions and produce
evidence.

"Both the university and Mr. Woodall relied on the
SBI to help determine whether any criminal acts had occurred, since the SBI
had broad investigative powers not available to the university," said Tom
Ross, president of the state university system.

He added in his statement Monday that the
university's ongoing cooperation with the criminal process will continue to
its conclusion.

Martin said there was no evidence the university's
athletics department pushed students into courses with known irregularities
that would allow athletes to remain eligible for competition. Unauthorized
grade changes in the African studies department were not limited to
student-athletes, Martin said, and athletes generally didn't flock to
problematic African studies courses.

The NCAA sanctioned the university's football
program in March 2012 with a one-year bowl ban and scholarship reductions
for previously discovered improper benefits including cash and travel
accommodations. The NCAA reviewed irregularities in the African studies
department after an earlier campus probe found 54 problem classes between
2007 and 2011. The collegiate sports oversight body told university
officials it had found no new rules violations.

The school's chancellor issued her own statement
Monday on the indictment.

"The action described in today's indictment is
completely inconsistent with the standards and aspirations of this great
institution," Chancellor Carol Folt said in a statement. "This has been a
difficult chapter in the university's history, and we have learned many
lessons."

The corruption of academics at the University
of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could turn into the most revelatory
of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning
three years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of hundreds
of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold numbers of grades have
been changed without authorization and faculty signatures forged—all in the
service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite basketball and football
players academically eligible to play.

After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in
this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider
attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reportingalready done by the News &
Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.

The rot in Chapel Hill undermines UNC’s reputation
as one of the nation’s finest public institutions of higher learning.
Officials created classes that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more
scrutiny is needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used to
inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The corruption of a
scholarly discipline devoted to black history and culture underscores a
racial subtext to the exploitation of college athletes that typically goes
unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman,
Julius Nyang’oro, has been criminally indicted for fraud.)

Another reason Chapel Hill requires sustained
investigation is the manner in which the athletic and academic hierarchies
at UNC, along with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far
whitewashed the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left many
students intellectually crippled.

Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead
investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more
power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task
for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state
disloyalty. As hewrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to
connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I
can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective.
Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are
already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the
story. Keep those e-mails coming.

One source of insight is Jay Smith, a professor of
early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar who understands the
university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste
for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here
is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of what
I think goes on at major universities all across the country,” where the
business of sports undermines the mission of education. That sounds right to
me.

Smith has the best sort of self-interested
motivation for making sense of what has happened on his campus: He’s writing
a book about the whole mess, based in part on statistics and personal
experiences proffered by UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist
varsity athletes. To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of
an HBO movie.

I asked Smith what he thinks is going to happen
next. He pointed to comments that the local district attorney made when the
disgraced former Afro-Am chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December.
Orange County DA Jim Woodall told the News & Observer that a second
person is also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did
not identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone who
currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified Nyang’oro’s longtime
department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being involved in the bogus
classes,” the News & Observer noted. “She retired in 2009.” Both
Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s
criminal defense lawyer didn’t return my e-mail inquiry.

The indictment of Crowder, a relatively low-level
administrative figure, could crack open the case. It defies logic that
Nyang’oro and his assistant would have operated a rogue department without
the knowledge of more senior faculty members, if not top university
administrators. It further defies reason that this pair would have created
phony classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people in
the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to have ample
reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.

Even before that happens, according to Smith,
one or more well-positioned whistle-blowers are likely to go public and
start naming names if they think the powers that be are planning to isolate
Crowder and Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.

Jensen Comment
Put another way, the poor readers can only comprehend children's books. This is
why they need agents to explain their pro contracts. Opps only a few get pro
contracts.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has
revoked a reading specialist and adjunct professor’s permission to discuss her
research or otherwise use her data on student athlete literacy, just weeks after
she was featured in a network news story on the topic. The university also
questioned her methodology and the validity of her findings. "Whistle-Blower Blocked," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, January
20, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/20/u-north-carolina-shuts-down-whistle-blower-athletes

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has
revoked a reading specialist and adjunct professor’s permission to discuss
her research or otherwise use her data on student athlete literacy, just
weeks after she was featured in a network news story on the topic. The
university also questioned her methodology and the validity of her findings.

Mary Willingham, who works in the Center for
Student Success and Academic Counseling and teaches an education course,
cannot use data that could be used to identify human subjects until she
receives permission from the university's Institutional Review Board, it
told her last week. Previously, the board determined that review and
approval of her research was not necessary because it involved
“de-identified” data – meaning that it did not contain personally
identifiable information about human research subjects, either to the
researchers or the public.

In other words, the board believed it did not have
to oversee Willingham’s work because her data couldn’t be linked back to her
student subjects by anyone.

Earlier this month, Willingham
told CNN she’d worked with 183 Chapel Hill
basketball and football players for her research, from 2004-12, while she
was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Some 10 percent read below a third-grade level, she said. Willingham also
shared anecdotes about students she’d worked with during her career, such as
one who was illiterate, and one who couldn’t read multisyllabic words.

Another student asked if Willingham could "teach
him to read well enough so he could read about himself in the news, because
that was something really important to him," she told CNN. Her quotes didn't
identify any students by name or unique characteristics.

It’s unclear, however, if those comments were
related to her work as a teacher and adviser or researcher.

Willingham hasn’t published a paper on her
research, but has spoken publicly before about her experiences with student
literacy at Chapel Hill. She is credited with the blowing the whistle on a
no-show course scaminvolving athletes there that
made national headlines and prompted several internal investigations in
2010. (One of those investigations found that scam was isolated to one
department, and was not motivated by athletics, but dated back to 1997. The
university’s chancellor, Holden Thorp, resigned following the scandal.)

In a statement Friday, the university said the
review board had noted, through Willingham’s recent, public statements, that
she had “collected and retained identified data,” requiring review board
oversight. It did not say which of her statements revealed that.

“All human subjects research requires review by the
university’s Institutional Review Board,” a university spokesman said in a
separate, emailed statement. “Review and approval must be obtained before
the research can begin. In addition, any time there is a change to the
research protocol, the researcher must submit an updated application for
review and approval. Researchers are expected to describe in detail the data
being used in their work. That includes the specific data that a researcher
and their collaborators have collected and/or assembled, any further work on
the data that is planned, and how the data will be analyzed.”

The review board concluded in 2008 and again 2013
that researchers involved in Willingham’s project could not identify
individual subjects and that any codes that could allow linkage to
identifiers were “securely behind a firewall outside the possession of the
research team,” according to the statement. The board directed Willingham to
submit a full application for its review, and said that continued use of her
data without its approval would violate university and federal policies
protecting human research subjects.

The university also disputed Willingham’s claims
that it admits athletes who lack academic preparation.

"I take these claims very seriously, but we have
been unable to reconcile these claims with either our own facts or with
those data currently being cited as the source for the claims,” Chancellor
Carol L. Folt said in a
statement posted on the Chapel Hill website.
“Moreover, the data presented in the media do not match up with those data
gathered by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. For example, only 2 of
the 321 student-athletes admitted in 2012 and 2013 fell below the SAT and
ACT levels that were cited in a recent CNN report as the threshold for
reading levels for first-year students. And those two students are in good
academic standing.” (The news report cited that threshold as 400 on the SAT
critical reading or writing test, or 16 on the ACT.)

In addition to Folt’s statement, the university
published the results of its
analysisof eight years of admissions data for
athletes, which says 97 percent met the cited threshold. In 2013, it says,
100 percent of admitted student athletes achieved those test scores. The
student government released a similar statement, slamming Willingham’s data.

Folt said the university was investigating further
the discrepancy between its data and those presented in the CNN report. “We
also will do our best to correct assertions we believe are not based in
fact,” she added.

The chancellor and other administrators also
discussed Willingham’s research at a scheduled Faculty Council meeting
Friday. But a faculty member present who did not want to be named or quoted
directly said a lengthy presentation about the project focused almost
entirely on methodological concerns about Willingham’s assessment tool and
how accurately it could be used to correlate scores with grade-level reading
readiness, not the review board issue.

The university published a
news release late Fridayabout those findings,
accusing Willingham of making a “range of serious mistakes” in her research.

“Carolina has a world-renowned reputation for our
research, and the work we have just reviewed does not reflect the quality
and excellence found throughout the Carolina community,” Folt said in the
release.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I wonder what would happen if reading tests were required for the top ten NCAA
football and basketball varsity players?

More to the UNC scandal than empty classrooms
"Professors in Class on Time? Check. At the U. of North Carolina, a culture
of autonomy falls victim to one department's no-show scandal," by indsay
Ellis and Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-in-Classroom-on/143813/

. . .

The academic improprieties, in which professors' signatures were forged to change
students' gradee and undergraduates got
credit for courses that never met, went undetected for nearly 15 years
within the African- and Afro-American-studies department. The university
says the fraud appears to be the work of a longtime administrator in the
department and its chairman, Julius E. Nyang'oro, who led African-American
studies here for nearly two decades. Many of the students who were involved
in the questionable classes were athletes.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The internal control question is how students got access to their grade
sheets in order to change grades! Sounds like an insider made it easy for
them to find those grade sheets in the dead of night.

More to the UNC scandal than empty classrooms
"Professors in Class on Time? Check. At the U. of North Carolina, a culture
of autonomy falls victim to one department's no-show scandal," by indsay
Ellis and Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-in-Classroom-on/143813/

. . .

The academic improprieties, in whichprofessors' signatures were forged to change
students' gradee and undergraduates got
credit for courses that never met, went undetected for nearly 15 years
within the African- and Afro-American-studies department. The university
says the fraud appears to be the work of a longtime administrator in the
department and its chairman, Julius E. Nyang'oro, who led African-American
studies here for nearly two decades. Many of the students who were involved
in the questionable classes were athletes.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The internal control question is how students got access to their grade
sheets in order to change grades! Sounds like an insider made it easy for
them to find those grade sheets in the dead of night.

Didn't UNC learn from FSU?
Academic Fraud and Friction at Florida State UniversityOn Friday,
the National Collegiate Athletic Association announcedthat more than 60 athletes at the university had cheated
in two online courses over a year and a half long period, one of the most
serious cases of academic fraud in the NCAA's recent history. Yet just about all
anyone seemed to be able to talk about -- especially Florida State fans in
commenting on the case and
news publications in reporting on it -- is how the
NCAA's penalties (which include requiring Florida State to vacate an
undetermined number of victories in which the cheating athletes competed) might
undermine the legacy of the university's football coach, Bobby Bowden. Bowden
has one fewer career victory than Pennsylvania State University's longtime
coach, Joe Paterno, and if Florida State has to wipe out as many as 14 football
wins from 2007 and 2008, it could end Bowden's chance of being the all-time
winningest coach in big-time college football. Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/09/fsu

Compounding FSU's problem is an earlier cheating scandal
20 Florida State University Football Players Likely to Be Suspended in Cheated
Scandal

The Now Infamous Favored
Professor by University of Michigan AthletesA single University of Michigan professor
taught 294 independent studies for students, 85 percent of them
athletes, from the fall of 2004 to the fall of 2007, according toThe Ann Arbor News.According to the
report, which kicks off a series on Michigan athletics and was based on
seven months of investigation, many athletes reported being steered to
the professor, and said that they earned three or four credits for
meeting with him as little as 15 minutes every two weeks. In addition,
three former athletics department officials said that athletes were
urged to take courses with the professor, John Hagen, to raise their
averages. Transcripts examined by the newspaper showed that students
earned significantly higher grades with Hagen than in their regular
courses. The News reported that Hagen initially denied teaching a high
percentage of athletes in his independent studies, but did not dispute
the accuracy of documents the newspaper shared with him. He did deny
being part of any effort to raise the averages of his students. The
newspaper also said that Michigan’s president and athletics director had
declined to be interviewed for the series. Inside Higher Ed, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/17/qt

Jensen Comment
Given their admission qualifications naive analysts might wonder unqualified
applicants got into college. But it's really simple when you think about it. I
recall the time when five varsity basketball players sued UCLA because after
four years at UCLA they still could not read. To UCLA's credit none of these
illiterate basketball players graduated with a diploma.

Athletes Seek Out Professors Who Will Pass Almost Any AthleteWatkins says it is all too common to see athletes
grouped in certain departments or programs under the sheltering wings of faculty
members who appear to care more about their success on the courts, rinks and
fields than in the classroom. Faculty members are often the most vocal critics
of favoritism for athletes (the issues at Auburn were raised by one whistle
blowing sociology professor against another), he says, but it is frequently
professors who are responsible for the favoritism in the first place.
Rob Capriccioso, "Tackling Favoritism for Athletes," Inside Higher Ed, July 20,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/20/sports

Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers
(and took two online courses for him)The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at

Police say Alex Fabian Anaya, 30, an FIU alumnus,
logged into a professor's email account in 2012 to access four test exams,
and then organized a distribution system where he was paid up to $150 per
person for a copy of the stolen exam. Police equated the alleged crime to
breaking into someone's house and stealing their property. Anaya was charged
with dealing in stolen property, felony theft and burglary of an unoccupied
structure.

Two current students, Krissy Alexandra Lamadrid,
24, and Jason Anthony Calderon, 24, were charged with dealing in stolen
property. Police say they sold exams to other students. Anaya and Lamadrid
couldn't be reached for comment, while Calderon declined comment.

Anaya "stated that he was well aware that his
actions were illegal," according to the FIU police report. Lamadrid and
Calderon said they knew the exams were stolen, according to the police
report.

. . .

Cheating has been going on for a long time, but
what has changed is the technology," said Ralph Rogers, provost at
Nova Southeastern Universityin Davie. "There are
very small devices, essentially a watch, where you can access the Internet,
and that has become a challenge."

The
University of Central Floridamade national news
in November 2010, when students in a business class bought a test bank sold
online. It was shared with 200 students in the class, leading to unusually
high grades.

The instructor, Richard Quinn, confronted students,
who were required to come clean and take an ethics class or face expulsion.
Most admitted their involvement.

A cheating scandal involving the athletic program
at
Florida State Universityresulted in a four-year
probation in 2009. An FSU athlete reported he'd been instructed by a
learning specialist to take an online quiz for another athlete. The
university then discovered that 61 athletes in 10 sports, including football
and men's basketball, had committed varying degrees of academic fraud. Most
of the wrongdoing occurred in an online music course.

The Alligator, the student newspaper for the
University of Florida, reported a 2012 case where
a professor discovered that 242 students in a computer science class had
cheated.

UF is now studying new ways to combat cheating as
it launches an online university in the spring. This includes software that
uses cameras to monitor students as they take tests, said Jen Day Shaw, dean
of students.

While cheating allegations aren't unusual, most
don't lead to criminal charges. More common is for students to receive a
grade penalty, and be sent to an ethics class. They may face academic
probation, or in some cases get expelled.

NSU's Rogers said criminal charges are appropriate
in the FIU case if the allegations are true.

"It's a very serious issue to hack into a computer
and steal information," he said. "Someone didn't just find this information
lying around."

In the end, it was a pink baseball cap that
revealed an audacious test-cheating scheme in three Southern states that
spanned at least 15 years.

Test proctors at Arkansas State University
spotted a woman wearing the capwhile taking a
national teacher certification exam under one name on a morning in June 2009
and then under another name that afternoon. A supervisor soon discovered
that at least two other impersonators had registered for tests that day.

Ensuing investigations ultimately led to Clarence D.
Mumford Sr., 59, who pleaded guilty on Friday to charges that accused him of
being the cheating ring’s mastermind during a 23-year career in Memphis as a
teacher, assistant principal and guidance counselor.

Federal prosecutors had indicted himon 63 counts,
including mail and wire fraud and identify theft. They said he doctored
driver’s licenses, pressured teachers to lie to the authorities and
collected at least $125,000 from teachers and prospective teachers in
Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee who feared that they could not pass the
certification exams on their own.

Mr. Mumford pleaded guilty to two counts of the
indictment, just a week after he rejected a settlement offer. At the time,
he said that its recommended sentence of 9 to 11 years was “too long a time
and too severe”; the new settlement carries a maximum sentence of 7 years.

Mr. Mumford appeared in Federal District Court here on
Friday wearing a dark suit and a matching yellow tie and pocket
handkerchief. He said little more than “Yes, sir” in answer to questions
from Judge John T. Fowlkes.

Another 36 people, most of them teachers from
Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee, have been swept up in the federal
dragnet, including Clarence Mumford Jr., Mr. Mumford’s son, and
Cedrick Wilson, a former wide receiver for the
Pittsburgh Steelers. (Mr. Wilson paid $2,500 for someone to take a
certification exam for physical education teachers, according to court
documents.)

In addition to the senior Mr. Mumford, eight people
have
pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the
investigation into the ring, and on Friday, a federal prosecutor, John
Fabian, announced that 18 people who confessed to paying Mr. Mumford to
arrange test-takers for them had been barred from teaching for five years.

The case has rattled Memphis at a tumultuous time. The
city’s schools are
merging with the suburban district in surrounding
Shelby County, exposing simmering tensions over race and economic disparity.
The state has also designated 68 schoolsin the
city as among the lowest-performing campuses in Tennessee, and is gradually
handing control of some of them to charter operators and other groups. And
with a
$90 million grantfrom the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, the district is overhauling how it recruits, evaluates and pays
teachers.

District officials say that the test scandal does not
reflect broader problems, and that none of the indicted teachers still work
in the Memphis schools. (At least one teacher is working in Mississippi.)
“It would be unfair to let what may be 50, 60 or 100 teachers who did some
wrong stain the good work of the large number of teachers and administrators
who get up every day and go by the book,” said Dorsey Hopson, the general
counsel for Memphis City Schools
who this week was named the district’s interim superintendent.

“A teacher’s job is very hard. I know it is,” said
Threeshea Robinson, a mother who waited last week to pick up her son, a
fourth grader at Raleigh-Bartlett Meadows Elementary School, where a teacher
who has pleaded guilty taught until last fall. “But I would not want a
doctor who did not pass all his tests operating on me.”

The tests involved are known as Praxis exams, and more
than 300,000 were administered last year by the nonprofit Educational Testing
Service for people pursuing teaching
licenses or new credentials in specific subjects like biology or history.

By and large, they are considered easy hurdles to
clear. In Tennessee, for example, 97 percent of those who took the exams in
the 2010-11 school year passed.

Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of
FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, said that the
testing service had had problems with
cheatingbefore.

Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came
out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal."
It reported that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers
and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating
scandals in U.S. history." More than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta
schools investigated had cheated on the National Assessment of Educational
Progress test, sometimes called the national report card. Cheating orders
came from school administrators and included brazen acts such as teachers
reading answers aloud during the test and erasing incorrect answers. One
teacher told a colleague, "I had to give your kids, or your students, the
answers because they're dumb as hell." Atlanta's not alone. There have been
investigations, reports and charges of teacher-assisted cheating in other
cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los
Angeles and Washington.

Recently, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution's blog carried a story titled "A new cheating scandal:
Aspiring teachers hiring ringers." According to the story, for at least 15
years, teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee paid Clarence
Mumford, who's now under indictment, between $1,500 and $3,000 to send
someone else to take their Praxis exam, which is used for K-12 teacher
certification in 40 states. Sandra Stotsky, an education professor at the
University of Arkansas, said, "(Praxis I) is an easy test for anyone who has
completed high school but has nothing to do with college-level ability or
scores." She added, "The test is far too undemanding for a prospective
teacher. ... The fact that these people hired somebody to take an easy test
of their skills suggests that these prospective teachers were probably so
academically weak it is questionable whether they would have been suitable
teachers."

Here's a practice Praxis I math question: Which of
the following is equal to a quarter-million -- 40,000, 250,000, 2,500,000,
1/4,000,000 or 4/1,000,000? The test taker is asked to click on the correct
answer. A practice writing skills question is to identify the error in the
following sentence: "The club members agreed that each would contribute ten
days of voluntary work annually each year at the local hospital." The test
taker is supposed to point out that "annually each year" is redundant.

CNN broke this cheating story last July, but the
story hasn't gotten much national press since then. In an article for
NewsBusters, titled "Months-Old, Three-State Teacher Certification Test
Cheating Scandal Gets Major AP Story -- on a Slow News Weekend" (11/25/12),
Tom Blumer quotes speculation by the blog "educationrealist": "I will be
extremely surprised if it does not turn out that most if not all of the
teachers who bought themselves a test grade are black. (I am also betting
that the actual testers are white, but am not as certain. It just seems that
if black people were taking the test and guaranteeing passage, the fees
would be higher.)"

There's some basis in fact for the speculation that
it's mostly black teachers buying grades, and that includes former Steelers
wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, who's been indicted for fraud. According to a
study titled "Differences in Passing Rates on Praxis I Tests by
Race/Ethnicity Group" (March 2011), the percentages of blacks who passed the
Praxis I reading, writing and mathematics tests on their first try were 41,
44 and 37, respectively. For white test takers, the respective percentages
were 82, 80 and 78.

A New York University professor’s blog post is
opening a rare public window on the painful classroom consequences of using
plagiarism-detection software to aggressively police cheating students. And
the post, by Panagiotis Ipeirotis, raises questions about whether the
incentives in higher education are set up to reward such vigilance.

But after the candid personal tale went viral online
this week, drawing hundreds of thousands of readers, the professor took
it down on NYU’s advice. As Mr. Ipeirotis
understands it, a faculty member from another university sent NYU a
cease-and-desist letter saying his blog post violated a federal law
protecting students’ privacy.

The controversy began on Sunday, when Mr.
Ipeirotis, a computer scientist who teaches in NYU’s Stern School of
Business, published a blog post headlined, “Why I will never pursue cheating
again.” Mr. Ipeirotis reached that conclusion after trying to take a harder
line on cheating in a fall 2010 Introduction to Information Technology
class, a new approach that was driven by two factors. One, he got tenure, so
he felt he could be more strict. And two, his university’s Blackboard
course-management system was fully integrated with Turnitin’s
plagiarism-detection software for the first time, meaning that assignments
were automatically processed by Turnitin when students submitted them.

The result was an education in “how pervasive
cheating is in our courses,” Mr. Ipeirotis wrote. By the end of the
semester, 22 out of the 108 students had admitted cheating.

Some might read that statistic and celebrate the
effectiveness of Turnitin, a popular service that takes uploaded student
papers and checks them against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal
content. Not Mr. Ipeirotis.

“Forget about cheating detection,” he said in an
interview. “It is a losing battle.”

The professor’s blog
postdescribed how crusading against cheating
poisoned the class environment and therefore dragged down his teaching
evaluations. They fell to a below-average range of 5.3 out of 7.0, when he
used to score in the realm of 6.0 to 6.5. Mr. Ipeirotis “paid a significant
financial penalty for ‘doing the right thing,’” he wrote. “The Dean’s office
and my chair ‘expressed their appreciation’ for me chasing such cases (in
December), but six months later, when I received my annual evaluation, my
yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than
inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year.’”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Sadly it's the honest students who pay part of the price when professors let
students cheat. Honest students are bringing marshmallows to throw in a
gunfight.

"Forget About
Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION,
vol. 48, issue 12, November 16, 2001, p. B24) by Rebecca Moore Howard,
associate professor of writing and rhetoric, and director of the writing
program, at Syracuse University.

Howard argues
that "[i]n our stampede to fight what The New York Times calls a 'plague' of
plagiarism, we risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our
students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the
criminal-police relationship. Further, by thinking of plagiarism as a
unitary act rather than a collection of disparate activities, we risk
categorizing all of our students as criminals. Worst of all, we risk not
recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. Big reform." The article is
online to CHE subscribers at
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i12/12b02401.htm

Jensen Comment
I can't buy this argument. It would bother my conscience too much to give a
higher grade to a student that I strongly suspect has merely copied the
arguments elsewhere than the grade given to a student who tried to develop his
or her own arguments. How can Professor Howard in good conscience give a higher
grade to the suspected plagiarist? This rewards "street smart" at the expense of
"smart." It also advocates becoming more street smart at the expense of real
learning.

I might be cynical here and hope that
Professor Howard's physicians graduated from medical schools who passed students
on the basis of being really good copiers of papers they could not comprehend.

What is not mentioned in the quote
above is the labor-union-style argument also presented by Professor Howard in
the article. She argues that we're already to overworked to have the time to
investigate suspected plagiarism. Is refusing to investigate really being
professional as an honorable academic?

On July 18, the Bloomberg Businessweek
Getting In blog publicized the
story of NYU Stern Professor Panos Ipeirotis,
who caught 20 percent of his class cheating and found the effort he put into
rooting out the cheaters was not worth it. In the future, Ipeirotis said he
would assign projects requiring more original thought to creatively channel
the energies of his highly competitive students.

Some of those who commented on the blog faulted
Ipeirotis, blamed the cheating on the
Sterngrading curve, or said that cheating was
common at many schools. Bloomberg Businessweek asked two ethics
experts about the views they expressed.

David Callahan is a senior fellow at Demos, a
public policy organization in New York. He has a Ph.D. in politics and has
written extensively about ethics on hisblogfor years and in his book, The Cheating Culture,
published in 2004.

John Gallagher is an associate dean for the
executive MBA program at Duke University’s
Fuqua School of Business, where one of his
responsibilities is to prosecute honor code violations. Duke dealt with its
own
cheating scandalin 2007. It’s use of the episode
to reinforce the honor code was applauded by many.

David Callahan: I think you have to look at the real,
underlying causes. Students are extremely anxious today, they’re incurring
record levels of debt to go to college, and they’re relying on scholarships
and grants dependent upon maintaining a certain GPA. College is no longer
the last stop; now it’s a stepping-stone to a professional school and
graduate school. College transcripts and GPA really matter. On the one hand,
there’s more pressure than ever before to cheat, and on the other hand
there’s a tremendous amount of cynicism. When a professor complains about
cheating and points it out, students push back in a cynical way and say,
“This is commonplace. What’s the big deal?” Or they push back in a defensive
way and say, “The pressure’s on me to get good grades and cheating is one
way to do it.”

What are some assignments that make it easy
for students to cheat or plagiarize? What are some assignments where it's
harder to cheat?

John Gallagher: If you are giving
a proctored exam in a closed room, there's going to be far less opportunity
than if you are giving an assignment that requires people to do analysis and
make recommendations. Many institutions use case studies, so it's likely
that somewhere you can find someone who has done an analysis of the case. I
think that any time you ask students to personalize their work, talking
about its applications and concept, it's very much more difficult. No one
has written that material and it's unique.

What is the professor's role or
responsibility to ensure students don't cheat?

David Callahan: The responsibility
on professors in this day and age is to teach in such a way that makes it
harder for students to cheat. They need to take seriously the responsibility
to reduce the amount of cheating. It doesn't just fall on students to not
cheat. Lots of professors feel overburdened as it is, in terms of their
teaching obligations. Many don't want to make the extra effort in reducing
cheating, and unfortunately they have to make that effort.

Is this the curve's fault?

David Callahan: A zero-sum game
where students have to compete against other students exacerbates the
situation. Nobody wants to be the chump who's honest when everyone else is
cheating and you're in direct competition for grades.

John Gallagher: I don't think so.
[At Fuqua] we have a recommended grade distribution that our professors
follow, but they are never required to give a low pass or a failing grade.
There's no need for students to cheat. There are all kinds of people who
cheat for all kinds of reasons. I don't think that you would ever say that
the primary factor or force that leads students to cheat is there's some
kind of a curve.

What should the punishment be for students
caught cheating? Maximum? Minimum?

David Callahan: For the most part
there's typically very little punishment for cheaters, which is one reason
why there's so much cheating. You typically get punished with a slap on the
wrist: flunk a paper, flunk a class. Rarely are they suspended or expelled.
Of course, there are different gradations of punishment. But I think there
needs to be more. One incentive to cheat is that the punishment is lax or
minimal. If there's no punishment there's no deterrent.

John Gallagher: For us, the
maximum punishment is rescinding the degree. We've had five cases of alumni
where it was later discovered they cheated in one of their courses and their
degrees were revoked. The next is that people are simply expelled from the
university and there is a notation on their official university transcript
stating they were dismissed from the university because of a cheating
conviction.

The least severe punishment I have ever seen is
mandatory failing of the course, but in our particular world that has
significant ramifications. Anyone who fails a course must take a mandatory
one-year leave of absence before being allowed to return to retake the
failed course and finish the program. Everyone who graduates must have a
minimum 3.0 GPA. If you can imagine a five-semester program with a
conviction of cheating the fourth semester and you were given a grade of F
in a course, looking at the number of courses remaining, it might be
mathematically impossible to maintain a GPA and you'd be academically
dismissed.

What do you do when a cheating conviction
happens? What happens to the student?

John Gallagher: I never speak to
companies [who sponsor EMBA students] because of student privacy issues, but
I have witnessed the impact of convictions on students. In my experience,
companies treat this very severely. It's a severe violation of ethics and it
is not something that I would ever expect a company would ignore or have a
wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude toward at all. In many cases, these companies
are paying students' tuition and if they're not financially involved, then
they've given them the time they need. They are stakeholders in the
student's education, and now the student is caught in an extremely awkward
situation having to explain the circumstances. It is very serious. It can
destroy someone's career and professional reputation.

More than a year after allegations of academic
improprieties surfaced in the University of North Carolina's athletic
department, we're still a long way from knowing the full extent of the
problems and whether the NCAA might issue new sanctions.

But you wouldn't know that from a statement the
university released last week, in which it said that the NCAA had yet to
find any rules violations following an apparently extensive joint
investigation. That assertion led to a chorus of unfair criticism against
the NCAA for failing to act.

Several investigations still have yet to be
completed in Chapel Hill, including one led by a former North Carolina
governor. And the allegations—which include reports of players' enrolling in
aberrant courses, unauthorized grade changes, and forged faculty
signatures—could still lead to NCAA sanctions, say former enforcement and
infractions officials at the NCAA, and others familiar with its
investigation.

What once looked like an open-and-shut case of
high-profile players' taking bogus classes to stay eligible is anything but
straightforward. Let's explore a few myths surrounding the case, which could
help explain the public's heightened expectations of penalties and give
clues to where things might be headed.

1. Academic fraud constitutes an NCAA
violation.

Academic impropriety would appear to strike at the
heart of college sports and the NCAA's stated mission to be "an integral
part of higher education and to focus on the development of our
student-athletes."

Yet, despite being a cornerstone of NCAA rules, the
term "academic fraud" is mentioned only once in the entire Division I
manual, as a basis for postseason bans, says John Infante, a former
compliance officer at Colorado State University.

As hard as it may be for the public to understand,
the NCAA rarely gets involved in issues of academic fraud, instead leaving
it up to colleges to police the integrity of their curricula.

In cases involving extra benefits for athletes,
preferential treatment of them, or recruiting violations, the NCAA is and
should be the sole arbiter, college officials say. But in situations that
touch on academic irregularities, NCAA institutions have made it clear that
they don't want the association to meddle.

Unless a member of an athletic department knowingly
arranges for an athlete to receive fraudulent credit, knows about such
fraud, or helps facilitate improper grade changes or other academic
shenanigans, the NCAA usually stays away.

Likewise, if both nonathletes and athletes are
enrolled in the sham classes, the NCAA often doesn't get involved. Its
thinking: This goes beyond sports.

You can question the logic—some, in fact, have said
any form of academic misconduct deserves the NCAA's attention—but it's hard
to argue that the NCAA is better positioned to enforce academic standards
than the faculty.

2. This is one of the biggest academic
scandals college sports has ever seen.

Pat Forde, the national college columnist for
Yahoo! Sports, was among several writers to weigh in on the problems in
recent weeks, saying that North Carolina seems to have "made a mockery of
its ballyhooed academic mission for a long time in order to gain competitive
advantage in football and men's basketball." Its alleged violations, he
argued, could call for the most severe of NCAA penalties, as it may have
demonstrated a lack of institutional control.

A university report
released in May found that Julius Nyang'oro, a former chair of the
department of African and Afro-American studies, and Deborah Crowder, a
former department manager, had been involved in creating at least 54 classes
that had little or no instruction.

Through a public-records request, the Raleigh
News & Observer
determined that athletes had accounted
for nearly two-thirds of the enrollments, with football players taking up
more than a third of the seats.

Last month the newspaper found evidence
that Julius Peppers, a former two-sport star at North Carolina who is now an
all-pro player in the NFL, had gotten D's and F's in many courses, but had
received a B or better in some of the no-show ones.

According to the player's transcript, which the
university accidentally posted on its Web site, he was allowed to take an
independent-studies class the summer after his freshman year­—a course
typically offered to more-experienced students who have demonstrated
academic proficiency. Those classes appeared to help Mr. Peppers maintain
his eligibility in football and basketball. (In a statement released by his
agent, Mr. Peppers said he had committed no academic fraud.)

It's hard to see how those alleged transgressions,
which stretched back to the 1990s, didn't provide certain athletes with an
unfair advantage. But are they among the worst ever, as some observers have
claimed?

On the continuum of academic fraud in the NCAA, the
worst violations usually involve accusations of academic dishonesty, in
which someone else does the work for the athletes or they either buy or
plagiarize papers or get access to exam answers ahead of time, says Mr.
Infante, the former Colorado State compliance officer, who now works as an
NCAA expert for Athleticscholarships.net, a Web site on recruiting.

On the opposite end, he says, are examples of
athletes who cluster in easier majors or are directed into snap courses.

Somewhere in the middle are independent-study
courses where there's less assurance that the players are actually doing the
work.

Poorly supervised independent-study courses were
part of the problem at North Carolina, the university's report says. But the
university also found evidence that students had completed written work.

For those and other reasons, maybe this won't turn
out to be one of the worst academic scandals we've seen, says Mr. Infante.
But the North Carolina case could turn out to be one of the more important
ones in pushing the NCAA and member institutions to take a closer look at
how athletes progress through the system.

"The NCAA as a whole ... needs to move beyond [the
Academic Progress Rate] and the awarding of degrees into regulating how
athletes are educated," he says. "If it starts with stricter regulation of
online and independent-study classes, that sounds like a good first step."

3. The NCAA went outside its typical
judicial process to punish Penn State. It should do the same with North
Carolina.

Mr. Forde, the Yahoo! columnist, believes the
situation demands a signal from Mark Emmert, the NCAA's president. "Will he
and the NCAA Executive Committee cowboy up again?" he wrote last month.
"Will they circumvent the rules manual and due process and go after Carolina
on the basis of general principle, à la Penn State?"

Earlier this year the NCAA penalized North Carolina
after members of its football team committed academic fraud and multiple
athletes accepted $31,000 in impermissible benefits. But as the academic
problems there have widened, NCAA leaders have made it clear they're in no
hurry.

They have also done what they can to distance the
problems at North Carolina from those at Penn State, where a former
assistant football coach serially molested young boys while top
administrators reportedly worked to conceal the crimes. The alleged cover-up
led Mr. Emmert to impose unprecedented penalties on the university,
including a $60-million fine and a four-year bowl ban.

But as recently as last week, Mr. Emmert called the
Penn State situation extraordinary and said he hoped he never had to
exercise that type of power again.